An unfortunate biological “feed-forward” loop drives cartilage cells in an arthritic joint to actually contribute to progression of the disease, say researchers at Duke University and Washington University in Saint Louis.
Pain researcher and mechanobiologist Wolfgang Liedtke, a professor of neurology at Duke, partnered with former Duke colleague and cartilage expert Farshid Guilak, now at the Washington University School of Medicine, to examine the activity of pressure-sensitive ion channels in cartilage. Their study appears the week of March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.