The contribution of hip geometry to the prediction of hip osteoarthritis

Objective: To determine how well measures of hip geometry can predict radiological incident hip ostearthritis (HOA) compared to well known clinical risk factors. Design: The study population is part of the Rotterdam Study, a prospective population-based cohort. Baseline pelvic radiographs were used to measure hip geometry by two methods: Statistical Shape Models (SSM) and predefined geometry parameters (PGPs). Incident HOA (Kellgren and Lawrence (KL >= 2) was assessed in 688 participants after 6.5 years without radiographic HOA at baseline. The ability to predict HOA was quantified using the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve ( Results: Comparison of the two methods showed that both contain information that is not captured by the other method. At 6.5 years follow-up 132 hips had incident HOA. Five PGPs (Wiberg angle, Neck Width (NW), Pelvic Width (PW), Hip Axis Length (HAL) and Triangular Index (TI)) and two SSM (modes 5 and 9) were significant predictors of HOA (P = 0.007). Hip geometry added 7% to the prediction obtained by clinical risk factors (AUC = 0.67 (geometry), 0.66 (gender, age, Body Mass Index (BMI)) and co Conclusions: Hip geometry has a moderate ability to predict HOA in participants with and without initial signs of osteoarthritis (OA), similar to and largely independent of the predictive value of clinical risk factors. (C) 2013 Osteoarthritis Research Society International. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.