Osteoarthritis year in review 2022: Epidemiology & therapy

This ‘Year in Review’ provides a synopsis of key research themes and individual studies from the clinical osteoarthritis (OA) field, focused on epidemiology and therapy. The electronic database search for the review was adapted from the 2021 year in review search, to increase search specificity for relevant study designs, and was conducted in Medline, Embase and medRxiv (31st March 2021 to 4th March 2022). Following screening for eligibility, studies were grouped according to their key research design, including reviews, cohorts and randomised trials. 11 key themes emerged, including the importance of several comorbidities in predicting OA incidence and prevalence, surgical approaches that can reduce the risk of post-traumatic OA, the heterogenous but nevertheless relatively stable nature of OA subgroup trajectories, the paucity of robust studies particularly of surgery for OA and the very modest benefit of many therapies under evaluation in trials. A particular interest of the authors was to consider whether new studies are helping determine how to better ensure the right patient with OA is matched to the right treatment at the right time. There are several new studies developing improved predictive models through big data analytics and machine learning which show promise, need validation, and may support new approaches to stratified care.