Osteoarthritis year in review 2024: Biomechanics

We aimed to systematically review and summarize the literature of the past year on osteoarthritis (OA) and biomechanics, to highlight gaps and challenges, and to present some promising approaches and developments.

A systematic literature search was conducted using Pubmed and the Web of Science Core Collection. We included original articles and systematic reviews on OA and biomechanics in human subjects published between April 2023 and April 2024.

Of the 155 studies that met the inclusion criteria, 9 were systematic reviews and 146 were original (mostly cross-sectional) studies that included a total of 6488 patients and 1921 controls with a mean age of 57.5 and 44.7 years, respectively. Promising advances have been made in medical imaging of affected soft tissue structures, the relationship between soft tissue properties and biomechanical changes in OA, new technologies to facilitate easier assessment of ambulatory biomechanics, and personalized physics-based models that also include complex chemical and mechanobiological mechanisms, all of which are relevant to gaining mechanistic insights into the pathophysiology of OA.

There is still an unmet need for larger longitudinal data sets that combine clinical, radiological, and biomechanical outcomes to characterize the biomechanical fingerprint that underlies the trajectory of functional decline and biomechanical phenotypes of OA. In addition, criteria and guidelines for control groups, as well as methods and standards for model verification allowing for comparisons between studies are needed.