Articular cartilage is avascular, alymphatic and aneural with poor self-repair ability. Cartilage defects are mostly repaired by fibrocartilage after injury, which easily progresses to osteoarthritis and causes a heavy public health burden. Traditional clinical repair methods have inherent limitations, while absorbable biomaterials such as collagen, hyaluronic acid, PLGA and PCL are promising candidates for cartilage regeneration. At present, preclinical animal studies on absorbable cartilage repair materials suffer from severe methodological heterogeneity, and a standardized core outcome set (COS) is still lacking. Variable outcome indicators and insufficient reporting of material degradation characteristics, degradation product toxicity, and degradation-regeneration matching lead to incomparable research results, poor evidence synthesis and obvious publication bias, greatly hindering clinical translation. Currently, COS for cartilage repair is only available in clinical trials, whereas the preclinical COS remains vacant. This study aims to construct a consensus-based COS for preclinical animal experiments of absorbable materials repairing articular cartilage defects. It will standardize outcome selection, detection and reporting, reduce research heterogeneity, improve preclinical research quality, and provide standardized evidence for the research, evaluation and clinical translation of cartilage repair biomaterials.
ContributorsBo Yuan
College of Biomedical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, P. R. China.
National Engineering Research Center for Biomaterials, Sichuan University, Chengdu, P. R. China.
Bin Ma
Evidence-Based Medicine Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, P. R. China.
Research Center for Medical Device Regulatory Science, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, P. R. China.
Industry Center for Evidence-Based Research and Evaluation Standards in Medical Devices, Lanzhou, P. R. China.
Disease Category: Orthopaedics & trauma
Disease Name: Articular Cartilage Defect
Age Range: Unknown
Sex: Either
Nature of Intervention: Other
- Methodologists
- Researchers
- COS (Other)
- Consensus meeting
- Delphi process
- Literature review
- Semi structured discussion
Outcomes from eligible animal studies on absorbable materials for cartilage repair were extracted from SinoMed, PubMed (until Dec 2025), PCT and ASR. After independent data extraction and semi-structured interviews, outcomes were categorized into six domains. Two rounds of anonymous 1–9 scale Delphi surveys were performed among stakeholders. Items meeting the 70% threshold were retained in each round. An online consensus meeting with anonymous voting was carried out; outcomes voted critical by more than 70% experts constituted the final COS.