Abstract
Osteoarthritis (OA), a progressive degenerative disease of cartilage in joints, is the most common cause of chronic disability in older adults. While OA is mostly considered an age-related pathology, women have a 1.5-fold higher risk of developing OA relative to men and experience more severe symptoms. Yet, they remain underrepresented in musculoskeletal research and clinical trials. Responsible for cartilage formation, articular chondrocytes experience physiological changes in OA, but the functional implications of such alterations remain largely unexplored due to difficulties in acquiring the data experimentally. Through reparameterization, we expand a mathematical chondrocyte model to investigate sex-specific OA pathogenesis. We performed sensitivity analysis to address the impact of ion channel activity in healthy and OA chondrocyte populations. Simulations show that in healthy female chondrocytes, the resting membrane potential is more depolarized than in healthy male chondrocytes, suggesting potential sex-specific emergent physiological differences in articular chondrocytes. In both sexes, the resting membrane potential of healthy chondrocytes is most sensitive to πΌπΆπβπ΄ππ, πΌππβπ, πΌπππΎ and πΌπΎβπ, but in OA it depolarizes and becomes sensitive to πΌπΎπ·π , πΌπππΎ and πΌπΎβπ. Developed and evaluated against experimental data, our articular chondrocyte OA electrophysiological model can be used to further study OA pathology and sex-specific pathological OA changes.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
Β© 2023 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ngo, K., Herrera, N.T., Folkmanaite, M., Yamamoto, K., Maleckar, M.M. (2023). In silico Investigation of Sex-Specific Osteoarthritis in Human Articular Chondrocytes. In: McCabe, K.J. (eds) Computational Physiology. Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing(), vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25374-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25374-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-25373-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-25374-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)