2010.01.20 - Kyle Allen - Joint pain with small animal models

Evaluating pain sensitivity and joint dysfunction in small animal models in musculoskeletal disease - Kyle Allen

• Works with Dr. Setton at Duke has a K99 <-check out when you are a post-doc
• Joint disease
  • Loss of proteoglycans
  • Surface fibrillation
  • Affects entire joint not just cartilage
• Define pain related behaviors in rodents
  • Developing a phenotype that actually correlates with disease
  • Type IX collagen knock-out
    • Causes OA-like lesions
    • Have similar geometry in skeleton to wild-type
  • Test force at which the animals will withdraw from shows a difference between KO and WT
  • Measured gait parameters in KO
    • Stride length shorter
    • Contact on the ground longer
• Found that the best predictor of knee OA in rodent model with Collagen IX knock-out
  • Force sensitivity is probably one of the best predictors of OA
• Problems with this model are that OA is usually a local pathologies not a global one.
• Interleukin-1B up-regulation seems to correspond to OA and addition of IL1 has been shown to improve cartilage.
• Gait perturbations when messing with dorsal root ganglion, but returns back to normal gait kinematics.
• Injection of TNF appears to reduce symptoms of lower back pain.
• Want to use ground reaction forces as a predictor of musculoskeletal diseases
• Medial lateral forces are reduced in rats with lower back pain