News

Dr. Kumar wrote about physical therapy and osteoarthritis for ACSM

June 25th, 2025

American College of Sports Medicine published Dr. Kumar's commentary on "Osteoarthritis and Physical Therapy" under the ACSM Hot Topic series for this month.

In this piece, he summarizes our studies using real-world claims data that highlight the importance of physical therapy for people diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis and those receiving knee replacement surgeries.

He also touches upon the need for addressing comorbid psychological impairments and nervous system dysfunction that are commonly present in people experiencing chronic pain due to osteoarthritis.

Read the commentary here: https://acsm.org/hot-topic-osteoarthritis-and-physical-therapy/

Welcome Shogo Okada!

June 18th, 2025

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

June 10th, 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!

June 2nd, 2025

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!

May 20th, 2025

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!

New publication in Osteoarthritis and Cartilage Open

May 8th, 2025

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