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An Ohio University professor hopes his research can help relieve the pain of osteoarthritis

By: David Forster
Posted on: Monday, August 24, 2026

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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Human growth hormone has an impact on how osteoarthritis develops in our bodies. A researcher at Ohio University has a goal of developing methods to prevent this degeneration of our joints.

Shouan Zhu is a professor at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and director of the Osteoarthritis Research Laboratory. He recently received a large grant to study how blocking growth hormone expression may help protect against osteoarthritis and the pain that comes with it as we age.

Zhu sat down to speak with WOUB’s David Forster for “Modern Science.”

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

On the causes of osteoarthritis

“There are many cellular processes that go wrong when you’re aging. For example, each cell in our body has this metabolic machinery basically generating ATP (adenosine triphosphate) for the cells to function properly. The cells, when they age, they have this metabolic dysfunction that instead of generating normal amount of ATP, they probably generate less and just don’t have the energy for the cells to function properly.

“ATP, that’s sort of the energy the cells use just to have the normal functions of different processes.”

How excess growth hormone may make things worse

“What we discovered is growth hormone promotes a metabolic process called fatty acid oxidation. Basically, the cells instead of using, for example, glucose as an energy source, they start to use fatty acids like fats as an energy source. The problem with using that is the cells will be overly active for their metabolism. They will generate a lot of byproducts. That in turn will affect the cell function.”

On what Zhu will be looking at in the next round of research

“Part of the research proposal is to figure out the mechanism of how growth hormone is promoting the joint degeneration. The other piece for this grant is if growth hormone itself have functions locally inside the joints.

“The way we do that is we take away the growth hormone action from the knee joints without affecting the overall growth hormone level throughout the body. Then if we see some protections that can potentially conclude that growth hormone also have some function inside the knee joints locally.

“We are trying to see if blocking growth hormone action inside the joint, that could potentially at least stop the disease progression. And we’re also interested to test if the disease course can be changed, ideally reversed. Because once you stop the pathology getting worse, the tissue itself have this self-repair capability. They may be able to heal at some point.”

The first draft of the transcript used for this story was created in Adobe Podcast, which includes an AI transcription tool. A WOUB news editor then reviewed, corrected and reformatted the transcript before publication.