Articular calcified cartilage microarchitecture has a predictive role in abnormal osteochondral strain distributions in murine age-related osteoarthritis

Authors

Evans, L. A., Sharma, A., Chen, J., Bourne, L. E., Parmenter, A. L., Brunet, J., Madi, K., Marussi, S., Lee, P. D., Pitsillides, A. A., Staines, K. A.

Abstract

Even though osteoarthritis is considered a disease of the whole joint, integrated analysis of articular calcified cartilage (ACC) behaviour with adjacent tissues remains a persistent limitation. Herein, we performed synchrotron X-ray computed tomography in intact loaded joints and coupled anatomical analysis with digital volume correlation to examine whether microarchitectural ACC features serve as predictive mechano-biomarkers of osteoarthritis. We reveal that male osteoarthritis-prone STR/Ort mice have thicker yet more porous ACC that contains larger but less spherical chondrocyte lacunae than their healthy parental-control CBA mice. This was linked to asymmetrical distribution of tensile and compressive strains generated under physiological loads in the ACC and underlying subchondral bone in tibial epiphyses of STR/Ort mice. Together these data suggest that murine ACC microarchitecture has a mechano-predictive role in age-related osteoarthritis.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 25 Sep 2026.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this preprint? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.