Development of Knee and Shoulder Metabolic Osteoarthritis and Spontaneous Bone Lesions in Male and Female Sprague-Dawley Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Obesity has been linked to Osteoarthritis (OA) through excessive joint loading and the associated mechanical stress on weight-bearing joints. However, the increased prevalence of OA in non-weight-bearing joints of people with obesity suggests a more complex etiology for obesity-induced OA than simply added joint loading. This thesis was aimed to examine the development of OA in the knee and shoulder joints of male and female Sprague-Dawley rats and the potential use of prebiotic fibre supplementation in protecting against or slowing the progression of OA. This study is divided into three parts: Part 1: We developed a novel scoring system to characterize OA-related degeneration, distinguishing it from spontaneous bone lesions observed in knees of male Sprague-Dawley rats. We found that spontaneous bone lesions could obscure the effects of diet-induced obesity models when OA was assessed using the classical scoring system. The new scoring method provides a reliable and reproducible approach to differentiate classical joint degeneration from spontaneous bone lesions. Part 2: We evaluated the effects of the high-fat/high-sucrose (HFS) diet on mesenteric fat, the infrapatellar fat pad (IFP) of the knee, systemic inflammation, local inflammation in the knee, and OA development of the knee in female Sprague-Dawley rats. Our findings indicated that mesenteric fat and the IFP were protected from inflammation associated with the HFS diet in female rats, highlighting sex-based differences in dietary responses. However, cartilage degeneration and subchondral bone lesions were more pronounced in the HFS group compared to chow group control rats, suggesting that the mechanisms underlying OA development and progression in female rats may differ from those observed in male rats. Phase 3: We quantified the effects of a HFS diet and prebiotic fibre supplementation on shoulder joint health in male and female Sprague-Dawley rats using the developed scoring system. Unlike knee joints, shoulder joints in both male and female rats appeared protected against joint degeneration when exposed to a HFS obesity-inducing diet. Furthermore, fibre supplementation was more effective in males than in females, suggesting that fibre may have sex-specific effects on the gut microbiota.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".