Oct  25, 2013

NHS hospitals are to be banned from fitting most metal-on-metal hip replacements after a study found unacceptably high failure rates among implants in 17,000 patients… …New draft guides drawn up by regulators say the NHS should stop using any hip implant with a failure rate higher than five per cent at five years. It means that almost every type of metal-on-metal hip implant – including five more devices still used – should no longer be fitted in patients. The warning from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has been issued after research uncovered failure rates as high as 43 per cent among some of the implants… …The metal-on-metal resurfacing models found to have such high failure rates are: the Adept, Cormet 2000, Durom, Recap Magnum,  Conserve Plus and Corail/Pinnacle ceramic on metal.. Just two types of metal-on-metal device in current use fall within the proposed national standard… …He said the scale of the problem was “extremely disappointing”… …The devices were introduced in the 1990s, but became most popular among surgeons over the past decade, with more than 11,000 a year being implanted by 2008 because it was hoped that they would offer better results.