Awards Aim To Advance Hip Arthritis Research 

By Vandana Suresh | Sept. 25, 2025 

About 1 in 4 people who live up to 85 years will be affected by hip arthritis and about 1 in 10 will need a total hip replacement. It is projected that nearly 2 million Americans will need total hip arthroplasty by 2060. Hip pain caused by osteoarthritis (OA) can lead to chronic pain, inflammation and a corresponding decline in quality of life. 

Historically, research on hip arthritis has gotten much less attention than the knee, which is the most common site for arthritis. Further, there is a critical need to identify people at risk of accelerated development of hip OA who can be closely monitored over the course of clinical studies. 

To support this effort, the Arthritis Foundation has awarded three HipOA awards totaling $750,000 over two years. This year’s awardees are Jessica Goetz, PhD, together with Michael Willey, MD, from the University of Iowa; Riccardo Lattanzi, PhD, from New York University; and Richard Souza, PhD, PT, from the University of California, San Francisco. 

“Advancing research in hip osteoarthritis is important to the Arthritis Foundation because new treatments and procedures are needed to reduce pain and disability but also preserve mobility, independence, and quality of life for patients,” says Jason Kim, PhD, vice president of osteoarthritis programs at the Arthritis Foundation. 

The HipOA awards are part of the Arthritis Foundation’s FastOA initiative, which aims to identify high-risk OA patients for clinical trials and future research on accelerated osteoarthritis. At first, the FastOA Initiative mainly concentrated on high-risk knee OA individuals. However, this initiative has evolved to include other joints vulnerable to developing accelerated osteoarthritis, including the hip. 

One group being investigated for rapid OA development are those with hip dysplasia. This condition, characterized by an altered hip structure, is a leading cause of hip arthritis. It is a painful condition often remedied through surgery to improve pathological joint movements. Building on the work previously funded by the Arthritis Foundation, Drs. Goetz and Willey will determine whether surgically corrected dysplastic hips are at a greater risk of accelerated OA development, or FastOA. Using a computer program called discrete element analysis, which they previously developed, the researchers will connect pathological joint movements post-surgery with osteoarthritic joint degeneration. 

For some patients with moderate joint damage, joint-preserving surgery may delay the need for total hip replacement. But for a subset of patients with femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), joint-preserving surgery does not work. FAI is a condition where the ball or “socket” of the hip joint is misshapen so they don’t fit together well, causing pain. These individuals develop hip osteoarthritis rapidly, eventually requiring joint replacement. Dr. Lattanzi and his team will utilize their award to build machine learning algorithms that diagnose FAI early, predict outcomes of joint-preserving surgery, and identify patients at high risk for rapid hip OA progression.  

Also focusing on FAI, Dr. Souza and his team will leverage MRI data from men and women who participated in high-impact physical activity, previously collected in a study called FORCe. Within the MRI data, they will look for biomarkers of hip OA and predictors of worsening hip morphology over five years. With the HipOA grant, they aim to develop a personalized risk calculator for the onset and progression of hip arthritis.