Abstract:

BACKGROUND: To explore the method of establishing animal models of knee osteoarthritis is a key topic of studying its etiopathogenisis and therapeutic method. Murine is commonly-used experimental animals for knee osteoarthritis model establishment. Model establishment method is various. According to the aims of experiments, different ways of establishing models were chosen.
OBJECTIVE: To analyze establishment methods of animal models of murine knee osteoarthritis, and to evaluate model preparation.
METHODS: CNKI full-text database and PubMed database were searched for articles about murine model for knee osteoarthritis published from January 1990 to December 2009 with the key words of “knee osteoarthritis, model, rat, valuation”. All data were primarily screened to exclude clinical observation and to look up full-texts. Moreover, references of each literature were checked. Experimental study (experimental animal was murine) was included. Repetitive studies and untypical study reports were excluded.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Totally 39 articles on murine experimental researches of knee osteoarthritis were collected and 25 in Chinese and 14 in English met the inclusive criteria. We draw the conclusion that murine intraosseous hypertension-induced osteoarthritis models showed good stability of animal knee joint; the methods of creating models are simple, with small trauma, which is consistent with mechanisms of knee osteoarthritis in clinic. Thus, the obtained models of knee osteoarthritis are reliable. A better model establishment method can be selected according to practical conditions (such as expense budget, experimental condition).