Effect of Training, Hyaluronic Acid, and Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies on Osteocalcin Gene Expression in Cartilage Tissue of Rats with Knee Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common progressive diseases in the joints. A few studies have evaluated the effect of combined endurance training (ET), hyaluronic acid (HA), and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) on bone mass.

The present study aimed to examine the effect of ET, HA, and MSCs on osteocalcin (OC) gene expression in cartilage tissues of rats with knee OA.

In this experimental study, 40 rats with OA were divided into eight groups of five rats, including (1) control, (2) MSCs, (3) HA, (4) ET, (5) HA + MSCs, (6) ET + HA, (7) ET + MSCs, and (8) ET + MSCs + HA. To investigate the effects of OA on OC, five rats were assigned to the healthy group. During eight weeks, the ET groups ran on a treadmill three sessions per week (30 - 50 min at a speed of 16 m/min), the MSC groups received MSCs (1  106 cells/kg) intra-articularly, and the HA groups were treated with a 10 mg/mL intra-articular therapeutic dose of HA. The OC gene expression levels were measured by the real-time PCR method. The Shapiro-Wilk and one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc tests were used to analyze the data (P0.05).

Osteoarthritis significantly decreased OC (P  0.05); nevertheless, ET + HA + MSCs, HA + MSCs, ET + HA, and ET + MSCs significantly increased OC (P0.05). Also, OC was significantly higher in the ET + HA + MSCs group than in either of ET, HA, or MSC groups (P0.05).

It seems that a combination of ET, HA, and MSCs has more favorable effects than each one alone on the improvement of OC in cartilage tissues of rats with knee OA.