A Review on Osteoarthritis Modeling Techniques

Osteoarthritis is a chronic systemic disease that can involve any joint in the body, but more often lower limb bearing joints and hand joints. The prevalence of this disease in humans increases with age and obesity. Biomechanical and biological changes that occur after knee injuries are involved in the development of post-traumatic osteoarthritis and, as a degenerative joint disease, cause irreversible hyaline cartilage destruction; which reduces the quality of life by causing permanent pain and joint dysfunction.
In order to better understand how osteoarthritis progresses, it needs to be modeled in animals; especially in the early stages of the disease, as well as the evaluation of the effects of new drugs and therapies. These models can be spontaneous or inductive. Spontaneous osteoarthritis can occur naturally in genetically engineered strains of rats. Intra-articular injection of chemicals such as mono-iodiacetate can also induce osteoarthritis. Today, many surgical modelings are also used to induce osteoarthritis, all of which indicate joint instability to cause the disease. Guinea pigs are commonly used for research on articular cartilage and are common models for studying the reconstruction process of focal cartilage defects. The development of experimental conditions inducing osteoarthritis is similar to the natural course of the disease in human due to joint instability and the final gross pathology is exactly the same.
The recent used methods to modeling osteoarthritis include the removal of lateral meniscus and anterior cruciate ligament transection, which appear to reduce inflammation and only create a mild joint instability; that way not only creates repeatable lesions in the model, but also the same kind as the lesions of osteoarthritis in humans. This method allows for the evaluation of cartilage degeneration by radiography, histology and molecular analysis.