Omics Studies in Osteoarthritis: A Review of Molecular Mechanisms and Candidate Molecules

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a joint disease of unknown etiology that can occur in joints throughout the body, especially with articular cartilage lesions of the knee joint and hip joint. Osteoarthritis not only causes joint pain, deformity, and functional impairment, but also significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular events, deep vein thrombosis in the lower limbs, and hip fractures. Up to now, there have been no specific medications available for the treatment of osteoarthritis, and the disease remains incurable. Therefore, identifying reliable biomarkers is crucial for achieving a more accurate diagnosis of OA and for guiding the development of targeted treatment strategies. In this paper, we screen and synthesize articles that performed transcriptomics and proteomics analysis on tissue or cell samples taken from osteoarthritis cartilage. We identify common differentially expressed genes (co-DEGs) and proteins (co-DEPs) in cartilage samples from knee osteoarthritis (KOA) and hip osteoarthritis (HOA) and consolidate them into candidate molecules, while systematically delineating their expression trends and underlying mechanisms at both the transcriptomic and proteomic levels. This review establishes a theoretical foundation and identifies future research directions for functional validation and clinical translation of these candidate molecules as potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets for osteoarthritis.