Project status: Active, enrolling new subjects

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a progressive degenerative disease that can cause chronic pain from joint inflammation. Patients who have failed physical therapy to manage their pain may elect arthroscopic partial meniscectomy (APM) to improve their symptoms. About 70% of patients that undergo APM have a clinically significant improvement in symptoms after surgery. However, the variation in this outcome is unexplained and hypothesized to be related to synovitis and joint inflammation, which are currently unmeasured and untreated in clinical care.

Sometimes APMs are complicated by stiffness and pain due to inflammation, resulting in longer recovery periods. The use of a long-acting corticosteroid injection may lessen synovial inflammation and improve recovery after surgery. The CoMeT (Corticosteroid Meniscectomy Randomized Trial) trial is a randomized, controlled, double-blinded trial that aims to evaluate the efficacy of extended-release triamcinolone (Zilretta) for the relief of knee pain and function after APM. We will also investigate the effect of Zilretta on structural damage of the knees and how different biomarkers are predictive of pain and function responses to Zilretta.

The CoMeT trial is led by Dr. Morgan H. Jones, MD, MPH, along with a team of investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Cleveland Clinic, Vanderbilt University, and Duke University. This study is supported by a grant from the Arthritis Foundation and Pacira BioSciences (the manufacturer of Zilretta). Subjects are currently being enrolled at Cleveland Clinic and the Brigham, and will be enrolled at Vanderbilt beginning in Summer/Fall 2023.