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.