“…Candidate mechanisms include hyperglycemia leading to joint tissue changes, particularly in collagen [27], and obesity leading to (1) increased mechanical load to the joint [31]; and/or (2) nonbiomechanical factors such as metabolism from increased fat [8,14,20,22]. Obesity is a risk factor for diabetes [1,15,17,19,30] and osteoarthritis [8,13,20,22,26], and both factors are increasing rapidly in the US population [6,10]. Unfortunately, data that might further explore these potential hypotheses are unavailable in our data set (BMI, HbA1c, adipokine biomarkers).…”