To assess the usefulness of the urinary crosslinked C-telopeptide of type II collagen (uCTX-II) or crosslinked N-telopeptide of type I collagen (uNTX-I) for evaluating radiological knee osteoarthritis (OA), a cross-sectional study was conducted in the cohorts of the Matsudai knee osteoarthritis survey performed in Niigata, Japan.
Urine specimens and standing knee AP X-rays were obtained from 1040 subjects who provided informed consent. The relationship between these markers and gender, age (patients aged 40-59 or 60-79 years), use of bisphosphonates, and OA grades (K-L classification) were analyzed. The diagnostic ability of uCTX-II to detect radiological knee OA was confirmed in the over 60-year-old subjects using a ROC curve.
The over 60-year-old men with OA grade 3,4 group had significantly higher uCTX-II levels than the other OA grade groups. In the over 60-year-old women, the uCTX-II levels significantly increased according to the progression of the knee OA grade. No significant difference was observed between the uNTX-I levels in the different OA grade groups. From the standpoint of biomarkers, the higher quartiles of the uCTX-II and uNTX-I levels gradually included higher numbers of grade ≥2 OA subjects in the over 60 year-old women. The area under the curve (AUC) in ROC analysis of uCTX-II exhibited a significant association with the diagnosis of knee OA in women (AUC 0.63), although the accuracy was evaluated to be low in the single measurement of our health checkup-based analysis.
This population-based study indicates that the uCTX-II level is strongly correlated with the knee OA grade in women over age 60. A further analysis is needed to clarify its predictive accuracy.