Serum proteomic biomarkers diagnostic of knee osteoarthritis

To better understand the pathogenesis of knee osteoarthritis (OA) through identification of serum diagnostics.

We conducted multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry analysis of 107 peptides in baseline sera of two cohorts: the Foundation for National Institutes of Health (NIH) (n = 596 Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grade 1-3 knee OA participants); and the Johnston County Osteoarthritis Project (n = 127 multi-joint controls free of radiographic OA of the hands, hips, knees (bilateral KL=0), and spine). Data were split into (70%) training and (30%) testing sets. Diagnostic peptide and clinical data predictors were selected by random forest (RF); selection was based on association (p < 0.05) with OA status in multivariable logistic regression models. Model performance was based on area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and precision-recall (PR) curves.

RF selected 23 peptides (19 proteins) and body mass index (BMI) as diagnostic of OA. BMI weakly diagnosed OA (ROC-AUC 0.57, PR-AUC 0.812) and only symptomatic OA cases. ACTG was the strongest univariable predictor (ROC-AUC 0.705, PR-AUC 0.897). The final model (8 serum peptides) was highly diagnostic (ROC-AUC 0.833, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.751, 0.905; PR-AUC 0.929, 95% CI 0.876, 0.973) in the testing set and equally diagnostic of non-symptomatic and symptomatic cases (AUCs 0.830-0.835), and not significantly improved with addition of BMI. The STRING database predicted multiple high confidence interactions of the 19 diagnostic OA proteins.

No more than 8 serum protein biomarkers were required to discriminate knee OA from non-OA. These biomarkers lend strong support to the involvement and cross-talk of complement and coagulation pathways in the development of OA.