VEGFA and osteoarthritis: Zupan et al. (2018) reported that the high expression of VEGFA indicating cartilage or bone degeneration is associated with pre-osteoarthritis. Furthermore, overexpression of miR-140-5p alleviates knee osteoarthritis by downregulating VEGFA in a rat model (Liu et al., 2022). BTG2 was found to be a critical gene related to inflammation in OA. Recent evidence showed that BTG2 is a hub node in the ingenuity pathway network of facet joint OA, which proposed its function in mediating signaling pathways by affecting other genes (Chen et al., 2020).