Early Intraarticular Injection of Hyaluronic Acid Attenuates Osteoarthritis Progression in Anterior Cruciate Ligament-Transected Rats

Abstract

Subject: Hyaluronic acid (HA) is widely used to relieve the symptoms of osteoarthritis (OA). An association of reduction of glutamate content with the synovial fluid of OA rats was reported previously.

Design: Anterior cruciate ligament transaction (ACLT) was performed on one knee in male Wistar rats, the other knee was assigned to sham control and HA or saline was injected intraarticularly into the ACLT knee from week 3 to week 7. Knee dialysate was collected for amino acid measurement at week 20. Morphology and histopathology of the femoral medial condyles and synovium were examined and evaluated using Mankin and synovitis scores.

Results: HA injection provided better cartilage (3.38 ± 0.03 vs. 5.45 ± 0.0.02) and synovial condition (3 ± 0.02 vs. 6.03 ± 0.02) than saline controls. Moreover, HA injection reduced the concentration of glutamates in knee dialysates compared to saline controls (1.11 ± 0.14-folds and 2.21 ± 0.19-folds of the sham-operated knee, respectively). Cystine/glutamate antiporter system expression was significantly downregulated in the saline group, but not in the HA group (0.32 ± 0.08-folds and 0.71 ± 0.10-folds of the sham-operated knee, respectively).

Conclusion: Early intraarticular injection of HA attenuates the progression of cartilage destruction in the ACLT knee, and the downregulation of the cystine/glutamate antiporter system was accompanied by the progression of OA.

• prophylaxis
• anterior cruciate ligament transaction
• osteoarthritis
• hyaluronic acid
• cystine/glutamate antiporter system

Acknowledgments

The statistics was performed by Mr. Ting-Cyuan Wong, Statistician of Department of Medical Science, Cathay General Hospital.

Tsai and Wong conceived and designed the study; Wong procured the project funding; and Tsai, Liu, Cherng, and Wu collected and processed the data. Tsai performed the statistical analyses. Jean provided the expert consultation and manuscript suggestion. Tsai and Wong drafted the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

The statistics was performed by Mr. Ting-Cyuan Wong, statistician of Department of Medical Science, Cathay General Hospital. This work was supported by grants CGH-MR-9912 from the Cathay General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, TSGH-C99-005-5-S01 from the Tri-service General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, and NSC100-2314-B-281-003 from National Science Council, Taiwan.