When describing character searches you must be very explicit as character variables may contain much junk.
For instance you say you want to keep "rows containing OA/Osteoarthritis"
NONE of your example data shows OA/Osteoarthritis (the / character ). Do you mean the string values OA and Osteoarthritis appearing as words (meaning OA by itself not as part of Osteoarthritis or in the word oak)?
For OA/Osteo similar with the added bit of Osteo not appearing in compound? But when you say with knee, since none of your example shows Osteo do you mean "OA" or "Osteo" and "Knee"?
Since your example data shows no instance of "Osteo" were you being lazy and not spelling "Osteoarthritis" completely? Spelling counts!
And will any of the words of interest be case sensitive: Find "Knee" but exclude "knee" (or vice versa)?
You know what you intend but computers are stupid and must be given very explicit instructions. Without those explicit rules we could make some guesses but might very well miss some conditions that seem obvious to you but we are not mind readers.
Here is a suggestion based on guesses.
assuming you want to match Knee or knee or kNee and similar
data want;
set have;
if (findw(str,'OA',' (),:;','i')>0 and findw(str,'OSTEOARTHRITIS',' (),:;','i' ))
or
( (findw(str,'OA',' (),:;','i') or findw(str,'OSTEOARTHRITIS',' (),:;','i') )
AND findw(str,'KNEE',' (),:;','i') )
;
run;
where STR is the name of your variable with the text to search.
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