News
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
New publication in Arthritis & Rheumatology
Physical therapist-provided interventions remain the first-line recommendation for managing pain and disability related to knee osteoarthritis. However, utilization of physical therapy remains low vs. use of less effective and potentially harmful interventions including intra-articular corticosteroids and intra-articular hyaluronic acid injections.
Using real-world claims data from 67,245 people with incident knee osteoarthritis, we report that earlier initiation of physical therapy (i.e., within 1 month of diagnosis) and more than 12 sessions of physical therapy are related to lower odds of future intra-articular therapy utilization in this population.
These real-world data provide support for optimizing treatment recommendations and practical guidance for implementation of timing and dose of physical therapy care in people with newly diagnosed knee osteoarthritis while minimizing the need for more invasive therapies that themselves may have minimal (if any) long-term benefit along with concerns about long-term safety.
Read more here: https://acrjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/art.43155.
