Akanksha Singh
Despite high prevalence and social impact, osteoarthritis (OA) is
far behind other skeletal diseases like osteoporosis in the development
of disease-modifying treatments. This is mainly because little is
known about the underlying molecular mechanism that could be
the therapeutic target. Since OA is a multifactorial disease caused
by complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors
with estimates of around 50% heritability depending on the site,
numerous efforts and great expense have been spent on human genetic
studies on OA worldwide. Although linkage studies have shown large
areas of chromosomes associated with the disease, they have failed to
detect the susceptible genes.