Societal Cost of Opioid Use in Symptomatic Knee Osteoarthritis Patients in the United States.

Objective: Symptomatic knee osteoarthritis (SKOA) is a chronic, disabling condition, requiring long-term pain management; over 800,000 SKOA patients in the US use opioids on a prolonged basis. We aimed to characterize the societal economic burden of opioid use in this population.

Methods: We used the Osteoarthritis Policy Model, a validated computer simulation of SKOA, to estimate the opioid-related lifetime and annual cost generated by the US SKOA population.

Prevalence of Undiagnosed Subchondral Insufficiency Fractures of the Knee in Middle Age Adults with Knee Pain and Suspected Meniscal Tear.

Objective: Symptomatic knee osteoarthritis (OA) and meniscal tear are often treated with weight-bearing exercises and without ordering advanced imaging (e.g. MRI).

A Neofunctionalized X-Linked Ampliconic Gene Family Is Essential for Male Fertility and Equal Sex Ratio in Mice.

The mammalian sex chromosomes harbor an abundance of newly acquired ampliconic genes, although their functions require elucidation [1-9]. Here, we demonstrate that the X-linked Slx and Slxl1 ampliconic gene families represent mouse-specific neofunctionalized copies of a meiotic synaptonemal complex protein, Sycp3. In contrast to the meiotic role of Sycp3, CRISPR-loxP-mediated multi-megabase deletions of the Slx (5 Mb) and Slxl1 (2.