PhD defence Q. (Qiuke) Wang

Summary:

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a common and chronic joint disease, which causes knee pain and functional limitation and subsequently affects quality of life. The natural trajectory of knee OA indicates an irreversible route from health to the pre-clinical phase and then to early-stage OA and clinically relevant OA. This thesis consists of three parts covering the knee OA disease course from early to clinically relevant status. In the first part, we aimed to see how early-stage knee OA was defined in previous literature, and to refine and validate our previously proposed early diagnostic criteria for knee OA patients in primary care. Then we aimed to see how the clinically relevant knee OA diagnosis was made by clinicians and what the role of radiographs was in this process. The last part was to evaluate the effectiveness of intramuscular glucocorticoid injections in clinically relevant knee OA patients in primary care.