Validation of the Diagnostic and Prognostic Values of ADAMTS5 and FSTL1 in Osteoarthritis Rat Model

Objective: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a global public health problem and a leading cause of morbidity and disability. Due to lack of sensitive and specific tools for early OA diagnosis and predicting prognosis, the availability of new reliable and sensitive biomarkers is a widely appreciated need to identify patients at risk for incident disease or disease progression. Accordingly, our study was conducted to validate the usefulness of disintegrin and metalloproteinase with thrombospondin motifs 5 (ADAMTS5) and follistatin-like protein 1 (FSTL1) to achieve this goal.

Design: Fifty-four male Wistar rats were randomized into 3 groups; 24 rats were subjected to medial meniscal tear (MMT) surgery on the right knee joint (OA group), 24 rats were subjected to sham surgery (sham group), and 6 healthy rats (negative control group). Six animals from each group were sacrificed every 2 weeks. At each time point, the right knee joint of each animal was visualized radiologically, a blood sample was collected, and cartilage tissues were isolated for histopathological and western blot analysis.

Results: We found that the expression levels of ADAMTS5 and FSTL1 significantly increased with OA progression, especially at weeks 4, 6, and 8 after surgery. Notably, the serum levels of ADAMTS5 and FSTL1 showed significant positive correlations with each other and with the studied inflammatory markers.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that ADAMTS5 and FSTL1 can serve as important and informative serological markers of disease activity in OA. However, further research is needed to validate their use for improving the diagnosis and prognosis of OA in humans.