Metabolic imaging of the joint

Osteoarthritis is a painful and disabling life-altering joint disease and the most common form of disability in our society. There are very limited treatment options for osteoarthritis and in most cases, osteoarthritis is slowly progressive, sometimes over a period of decades. More than 10% of entire the population in Europe has osteoarthritis in knee, hip or hands that leads to disability, pain and limited quality of life. In the METAJOINT study we propose to test new metabolic imaging methods of joint disease using MRI that can visualize the distribution of specific elements such as sodium, phosphorus and deuterium. As these elements are taken up in the tissue dependent on disease characteristics, the method can identify tissue turnover or metabolic aspects of the diseased or healthy joint, whereas conventional MRI detects hydrogen protons that provide only the amount of tissue such as cartilage thickness or volume. The aim of METAJOINT concerns the scanning of a limited set of a total of 15 patients for three imaging methods to scan for respectively phosphorus, sodium and deuterium, showing - for the first time – subchondral bone turnover through uptake of bisphosphonates, sodium retention in cartilage in patients with high salt concentration, and glycosaminoglycan turnover in cartilage through uptake of heavy water. This new ground-breaking evaluation method for joint disease will help pharmaceutical companies with better outcome measures in order to find disease modifying medication that can treat osteoarthritis and it can be used by physicians and surgeons for early detection of osteoarthritis and early prediction of the course of the disease, which helps to better guide patients with early or late phase osteoarthritis.