Figure 5.

Morphological characteristics of chondrocytes in grade‐0 and grade‐1 human femoral head articular cartilage. Histograms show pooled data regarding (a,b) percentage of cells with cytoplasmic processes, (c,d) number of processes per cell and (e,f) average length of cytoplasmic processes (μm) in the superficial (SZ), mid‐(MZ) and deep zones (DZ) of grade‐0 and grade‐1 cartilage. Data (mean ± 95% CI) were from N(n) = 11(1398) and N(n) = 5(551) for grade‐0 and grade‐1 cartilage explants, respectively. A hash symbol (#) indicates a significant difference according to one‐way analysis of variance followed by Tukey's multiple comparison post‐hoc test. An asterisk (*) showed a significant difference between grade‐0 and grade‐1 cartilage explants according to Student's t‐test. The single, double and triple symbols showed the level of significance for P < 0.05, 0.01 and 0.001, respectively.