Patients feel their pathological but not physiological tissue turnover: a correlation between serological tissue turnover biomarkers and patient-reported outcomes

Purpose: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic disease characterized by pain and disability. Central to the revised FDA guidelines for the approval of disease-modifying OA drugs are patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). There is a need in drug development to understand how biomarkers of tissue remodeling objectively relate to PROMs or even predict changes in PROMs. Data have shown that elevated turnover of type I collagen, the body's most abundant protein, is associated with increased all-cause mortality rates, high disease activity, radiographic progression in rheumatoid arthritis, and decline bone mineral density in osteoporosis.