Stratified medicine approaches for the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders

Stratified medicine approaches for the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders offer opportunities to effectively target interventions to those individuals who will gain most benefit from them and minimise adverse side effects. Such approaches have been the 'holy grail' of a variety of research fields spanning epidemiological, (epi)genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and imaging biomarkers that predict disease diagnosis, prognosis or response to treatment. In this review, we highlight the successes and opportunities for stratified medicine approaches across a range of musculoskeletal disorders, with a focus on genetic risk factors, since these are the most stable across the lifetime of each individual.