ORS 2025 - Ebony Parsons - Effect of Estrogen on Chondrogenesis in Female Articular Chondrocytes

Join Ebony Parsons as she explores the role of estrogen in cartilage for her honors undergraduate thesis and presenting at the annual ORS meeting in Phoenix, 2025. We used human articular chondrocytes isolated from patients undergoing total joint replacement or from healthy tissue isolated from cadavers. We investigated the effect of estrogen on chondrocyte growth, metabolism, ability to make extracellular matrix and the response to inflammation. There was no significant effect on any of these metrics, with the main take home message being that donor to donor effects were the greatest source of variability. Different donors responded differently to both inflammation and estrogen.