News

Welcome Shogo Okada!

Shogo Okada is a physical therapist and PhD candidate at Kyoto University in Japan. Shogo will be visiting with us for a 4 months. He will be examining the impacts of muscle dysfunction, particularly loss of muscle power, on gait and osteoarthritis progression, using the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study (MOST) data.

Welcome!

Walk to Cure Arthritis 2025

We were at the Arthritis Foundation Walk to Cure Arthritis 2025! It was great to see everyone who came together to raise funds and awareness for these health conditions.

Congratulations Aaron for summer UROP award!

Aaron Smith from the Data Science program was received a summer UROP award to continue his work on using neural networks to estimate knee loading from inertial sensors in people with knee osteoarthritis. Congratulations!

Graduations and farewells!

Congratulations Dr. Soyoung Lee for officially graduating! Congratulations Dina for completing the MS Human Physiology program! Congratulations Yiwen for completing the DPT program and welcome back as a PhD student!! Best wishes to Ranny for her move to Johns Hopkins!

Coverage about A&R paper in Healio Rheumatology

Read more here: https://www.healio.com/news/rheumatology/20250513/early-sustained-physical-therapy-stems-intraarticular-injection-in-knee-osteoarthritis

Congratulations Dina for defending MS thesis!

Dina did an amazing job at her MS thesis defense! Congratulations!

New publication in Osteoarthritis and Cartilage Open

Using functional neuroimaging, we report that people with chronic knee pain due to osteoarthritis exhibit greater prefrontal cortex activity during a step-up task compared to walking, likely reflecting larger task demand. Further, pain-related catastrophizing, but not pain severity, was related to a smaller increase in prefrontal cortex activity from walking to step-up.

These findings suggest that people with knee osteoarthritis may need greater executive resources and pain modulation during physically demanding daily activities compared to walking and that pain catastrophizing may be related to lower prefrontal cortex reserve during daily activities.

First author: Soyoung Lee, PhD

Free full text at this link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665913125000512

We were at OARSI Annual Congress in Incheon, Korea!

Rhodora and Ranny present at MHeT ARC Symposium

Rhodora and Ranny shared their work at the Musculoskeletal Health Affinity Research Collaborative (ARC) Mini-Symposium at BU.

New publication in Arthritis Care and Research

We reported that slight pain with exercise is related to greater likelihood of experiencing analgesic effects of exercise in people with knee osteoarthritis.

Read more here: https://acrjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acr.25524