Concerning musculoskeletal pathologies, in addition to markedly elevated levels in degenerated human discs and enhanced expression of catabolic markers following HIF-2α expression in cultured human NP cells (Huang et al., 2019), HIF-2α levels are shown to be higher in osteoarthritic human and mouse cartilage, and Epas1 haploinsufficiency is enough to lessen the severity of traumatic osteoarthritis in mice (Saito et al., 2010; Saito and Kawaguchi, 2010). Here, EPAS1 is linked to osteoarthritis.