New blood tests to diagnose osteoarthritis are on the horizon

Blood tests that could help diagnose and monitor osteoarthritis are being developed by a team from The University of Bristol using state of the art technology – and a grant from Arthritis Research UK.
Osteoarthritis occurs when cartilage at the ends of bones wears away, leading to stiff, swollen and painful joints. There is currently little effective treatment other than painkillers and joint replacement for those with most severe disease.
Recent funding is enabling a team, led by Dr Mohammed Sharif, to find out if two new biomarkers (specific physical traits used to measure the effects or progress of disease) found in the blood of people with osteoarthritis can be used to diagnose the condition. It is hoped that the biomarkers could tell doctors which patients are likely to get worse over time, and who is likely to benefit from specific treatments.
At the moment there are no simple tests for the early diagnosis of osteoarthritis; by the time a definitive diagnosis is made using X-rays, the disease is often in its advanced stages. And there are currently no means of predicting how a person’s osteoarthritis will develop or respond to therapy.
“There’s an urgent need to find new and better biomarkers, and we’ve now identified two that are likely to prove useful for diagnosis and monitoring of osteoarthritis,” explains Dr Sharif. “However, we need to be sure they will be good enough for use in an individual patient. Therefore in this research project we hope to find out whether they can reliably distinguish between a healthy person and a person with osteoarthritis, identify which patients’ condition will get worse, and whether a particular drug is working or not.
“Overall our study should have a major long-term impact on how the NHS manage and treat patients with osteoarthritis.”