RCT patient populations
pain
DISEASE
To further understand the differential responses to MSC treatments, we further investigated the heterogeneous OA patient populations enrolled in these trials. Some trials, including those of Freitag et al. [Fourteen out of fifteen RCTs reviewed in this section classified patients by KL grade, typically enrolling patients with KL grade 2–3 knee OA. However, within this classification, there is considerable heterogeneity in clinical phenotype (and disease endotype). We tried to parse differences in clinical phenotype looking at baseline pain scores (Table 