Figure 2

Association of cartilage degeneration severity with pathology for osteophytes, bone marrow lesions, subchondral sclerosis, joint effusion and synovitis. There are 5 groupings of CDS scores along the x-axis indicating the articular element being examined. These elements are bone marrow lesions, osteophytosis, subchondral sclerosis, joint effusion and synovitis. For each of these elements, three vertical bars are presented, representing mild, moderate and severe cartilage disease score (CDS). The legend shows sub-groupings based on the severity of disease for an individual articular element. The classification schema for these sub-groupings is described in Table 1. The y-axis indicates the percentage of patients in a CDS grouping with evidence of the severity of pathological change for each sub-grouping. The trend toward greater involvement of each element with greater CDS score is evident for osteophytes (p-value for trend < 0.0001), bone marrow lesions (p = 0.0003) and subchondral sclerosis (p = 0.009), but not synovitis (p = 0.58) or effusion (p = 0.46).