Bone marrow lesions (BML) are associated with painful and progressive osteoarthritis (OA). Quantitative MRI has been used to study early cartilage degeneration in knees with BML, but similar work has not been done in hips. The purpose of this study was to compare mean delayed gadolinium enhanced MRI of cartilage (dGEMRIC) relaxation values (T
Study participants (n=128) were recruited from a cross-sectional population-based study of people aged 20-49 years with and without hip pain. dGEMRIC and proton density (PD)-weighted MRI scans of one hip from each participant were used for this analysis. BMLs were identified from PD-weighted fat-suppressed images. We applied a sampling-weighted linear regression model to determine the association of the presence of BMLs with mean cartilage T
32 of the 128 participants (25%) had at least one BML. Subjects with at least one BML, compared to those without, had similar weighted characteristics of age, BMI, physical activity levels, and frequency of hip pain. Mean T
Our results suggest that hips with BMLs are associated with hip cartilage degeneration early in the OA disease process.