Complaints on hip implants have reached a staggering number, as posted in the August 22, 2011 issue of the New York Times. According to the analysis of federal data, the Food and Drug Administration has received more than 5,000 hip implant complaints since January of the current year. All-metal hip devices are associated with some complications like metallosis based on the symptoms manifested by its recipients. Among the hip devices that gained the most number of complaints is the DePuy ASR, whose recipients had experienced some major DePuy hip recall symptoms.
Generally, a hip replacement device lasts roughly for 15 years, however, complaints show that the hips begin to fail after only a few years. Revision rates of hip devices within 5 years are around 13 percent, based on a new unpublished data of the UK joint ministry. Patients who have had a metal-on-metal hip removed or are undergoing such procedure accounts majority of the filings made.
DePuy ASR gets 75 percent of the total hip complaints filed, a disturbing number considering the gathered statistics of complaints the report showed. With the presented data, DePuy ASR is considered to be one of the most problematic all-metal hip devices. Even so, the precise number of complaints cannot be given by the US FDA because of the agency’s overlapping system and there are complaints that were not from the US.
As stated in the FDA guidelines, many all-metal devices were sold under the 510 (k) approval process. In this system, products are introduced into the public without running some tests on patients and without requiring the manufacturers to track its performance. Producers are to make a study on the frequency of device failure and to determine its threat to patients, per order of the FDA.
The number of complaints for this year has surpassed the reported complaints of the previous four years combined. This data suggests that serious health issues persist with certain types of hip implants even as researchers give great effort on investigating the danger it brings to patients. In effect, many surgeons go away with using all-metal hip implants on their patients. These surgeons are unwilling to expose new patients to potential dangers of MoM hip devices when there are safer implants available. Consulting an orthopedic surgeon prior to and after a hip replacement surgery is advisable so as to prevent a DePuy hip recall and other danger presented by a hip implant.
