Early cartilage lesion and 5-year incident joint surgery in knee osteoarthritis patients: a retrospective cohort study.

OBJECTIVE: to investigate the association between cartilage lesion-related features observed in knee osteoarthritis (OA) patients' first MRI examination and incident knee surgery within 5 years. Additionally, to assess the predictive value of these features for the incident knee surgery. METHODS: We identified patients diagnosed with knee OA and treated at our institution between January 2015 and January 2018, and retrieved their baseline clinical data and first MRI examination films from the information system. Next, we proceeded to determine joint space narrowing grade, cartilage lesion size grade, cartilage full-thickness loss grade and cartilage lesion sum score for the medial and lateral compartments, respectively. Generalized linear regression models examined the association of these features with 5-year incident knee surgery. Positive and negative predictive values (PPVs and NPVs) were determined referring to 5-year incident knee surgery. RESULTS: Totally, 878 participants (knees) were found eligible to form the study population. Within the 5 years, surgery was performed on 61 knees. None of the cartilage-related features had been found significantly associated with incident surgery. The results were similar for medial and lateral compartments. The PPVs were low for all the features. CONCLUSIONS: Among symptomatic clinically diagnosed OA knees, cartilage lesions observed in the first MRI examinations were not found to be associated with the occurrence of joint surgery within a 5-year period. All these cartilage-related features appear to have no additional value in predicting 5-year incident joint surgery.

Genome-wide screening for risk loci of idiopathic recurrent miscarriage in a Han Chinese population: a pilot study.

The etiology of recurrent miscarriage (RM) is extremely heterogeneous, including genetic, immunologic, anatomic, endocrinological, and infectious anomalies. About 50% of RM is unexplained or poorly understood, which is called idiopathic recurrent miscarriage (IRM). The primary aim of this study was to identify the genetic loci that might be susceptible to IRM. Forty-four Han Chinese patients with IRM during the first trimester of their pregnancies and 44 healthy sex- and ethnic-matched controls were enrolled in this study. A case-control and genome-wide study was performed and 430 polymorphic microsatellite markers were analyzed. Three loci, 6q27 (D6S446, P = .028), 9q33.1 (D9S1776, P = .037), and Xp22.11 (DXS1226, P = .008), significantly associated with IRM were found. This work identified 3 genetic regions that might harbor genes predisposed to IRM and provided new insights for future genetic and etiological study of IRM. Further study is required to confirm it.