Fig. 4

Joint pathology scores in mice and rats. A Safranin-O photomicrographs displaying a variety of OA severity and semi-quantitative scores. First score represents femoral condyle, second score is tibia; a 0, 0; b 0.5, 0; c 0.5, 2; d 2, 4; e 1, 0.5; f 2, 4; g 1, 2; h 4, 6. Among these, a, c, e, g shows the contralateral knees and b, d, f, h shows the MCP-1 intra-articulate injection knees. B The OARSI semi-quantitative scores of knees of each pairs of two subgroups at each time point; a scores of contralateral knees, despite some individuals with relatively high score (<2), most of the scores were low and stable; b scores of MCP-1 intra-articulate injection knees increased over time with some knees reaching the maximum score of 6. The rate of increase plateaued in later time-points. C HE slides of rats’ knee joints, articular cartilage was almost completely lost in both experiment and contralateral knee at 2 week after CCR2 antagonist or physiological saline injection. a The lateral tibia plateau of contralateral knee; b medial tibia plateau of experimental knee following CCR2 antagonist intra-articular injection. The cartilage degeneration score of Both A and B reached the highest grade of 5, at 2 weeks after CCR2 antagonist or physical saline injection