As part of its recently announced contract with the National Institutes of Health to study osteoarthritis, Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket plans to build a new MRI suite.
Under the $8.96 million contract from NIH, investigators will track the progress of enrollees who are at high risk of developing the painful, degenerative joint disease. Memorial was selected by the NIH as one of only four clinical centers in the country to participate in the seven-year study, which will enroll more than 5,000 people, including 1,250 enrollees at Memorial.
”Essentially we’ll be forming a database, to be used by researchers and drug companies, to look at what causes osteoarthritis and what causes it to progress,” said Dr. Annlouise R. Assaf, a doctor at Memorial and principal investigator of the study. “They can develop drugs to slow the progression once researchers can discover and evaluate new biomarkers.”
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”Biomarkers” are indicators of disease: Obesity, for example, is a biomarker of diabetes. Researchers will monitor patients for a host of factors as possible biomarkers for osteoarthritis, Assaf said, including having previous knee injuries or being overweight.
Patients enrolled in the study will be tracked via x-rays, MRI scans, blood samples and questionnaires so researchers can monitor the progression of osteoarthritis.
Since a component of the study will involve conducting MRI scans on hundreds of patients, the NIH funding will provide Memorial with new MRI equipment, although the balance of the funding for construction of the MRI suite will be provided by the hospital, Assaf said.
Developing the protocol for the study likely will take more than a year, and enrollment will not begin until late 2003.
Roughly 20 new jobs will be added at Memorial for the study, Assaf said, including physicians, radiologists, radiology technicians and data clerks. Many of those additions, however, will be shifted from the Women’s Health Initiative, a massive, 15-year, NIH-funded study at Memorial that is in the process of winding down.
Researchers from Brown University, Roger Williams Medical Center and Boston University Medical Center also will be involved in the study at Memorial.
The osteoarthritis study will not include treatments, Assaf said, “but with such huge amounts of data, hopefully we can do something about this disease,” she said.
Osteoarthritis, which causes 85 percent of all knee-replacement surgeries, is a chronic, degenerative joint disease that causes pain, swelling and limited movement in a person’s joints. More than 16 million Americans – most of them elderly – suffer from the disease. There presently is no treatment regimen that can prevent the disease or slow its progression.
The NIH study, dubbed the “Osteoarthritis Initiative,” also will include investigators from the University of Maryland School of Medicine; Ohio State University; University of Pittsburgh and University of California, San Francisco, which will coordinate data from the study. The NIH and four pharmaceutical companies are funding the research.
“It’s stiff competition (to be included in the study), so we’re very excited,” Assaf said, adding that she thinks the NIH chose Memorial partly because of the hospital’s success with the Women’s Health Initiative, which enrolled more than 6,000 patients combined at Memorial and Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River.
