Prevalence of osteoarthritis (OA), a disabling disease of the joints, increases with age which is expected to become a major problem in health care given the growing elderly population and the poor treatment options. Research to apply potential biomarkers such as serum COMP or urinary CTX-II to monitor OA is promising. However, adequate discrimination between patients and controls is still limited which may be due to innate differences in biomarker levels hampering the association to OA disease status.

By combining data from 7 European cohorts from the TreatOA consortium we identified genetic markers near CSDM1 and near MRC1 and the COMP gene itself, affecting respectively uCTX-II and sCOMP levels.

We advocate that increased biomarker performance for OA may be accomplished by taking such genetic variation into account. (By Dr. Yolande Ramos, http://jmg.bmj.com/content/early/2014/07/23/jmedgenet-2014-102478 )