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Genetic Components of Knee Osteoarthritis (GeCKO) Study: The Osteoarthritis Initiative

The Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) is a publicly and privately funded prospective longitudinal cohort with a primary objective of identifying risk factors for incidence and progression of tibiofemoral knee OA. The OAI utilized a focused population-based recruitment to enroll 4,674 men and women between the ages of 45-79 years who either had radiographic symptomatic knee OA or who were without radiographic symptomatic OA in both knees but were considered high risk for OA because they had two or more known risk factors for knee OA. Subjects were recruited into the baseline phase of the OAI at multiple sites throughout the US between 2004 and 2006. All subjects were invited back for follow-up examinations to assess incidence or progression of OA annually, for up to 5 years.

Phenotype data from the baseline and follow-up examinations are available for public access from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) database at http://www.oai.ucsf.edu/.

The Genetic Components of Knee Osteoarthritis (GeCKO) Study was initiated in 2009 as a genetic ancillary study to perform a genome-wide association study to identify genetic variants associated with radiographic osteoarthritis. This study included 4,482 individuals participating in the parent OAI study. Following sample cleaning (e.g., removal of duplicates, sex mismatches, poor sample quality, etc.), the final sample set included 4,129 individuals.