Notably, the DEGs identified in the rabbit model of Perthes disease in this study correlated with genes previously reported to be involved in inflammation [IL-6 and HIFa (Zhang et al., 2015; Ren et al., 2021)] and angiogenesis [PTGER2 (Trau et al., 2015) and ALOX12 (Zheng et al., 2020)] in Perthes disease. Here, IL6 is linked to Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease.