Deng Z et al. found that MAPK14 was highly expressed in patients with osteoarthritis as the death promoter of chondrocytes (Deng et al., 2021), while the overexpression of MAPK1 could reduce the inflammatory injury of chondrocytes, which was induced by IL-1 β (Hu et al., 2018). Here, MAPK1 is linked to osteoarthritis.