1. Joint Implant Surgery Created by Doctors and Engineers

2. In May 2011 medical professionals and engineers established adatabase for tracking knee and hip implants given to recipients after the DePuy hip replacement recall. It was called American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR). Specifically, in the case of Johnson & Johnson, there are around 93,000 recipients of the ASR XL Acetabular System and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System worldwide.

3. Following the release of data showing defectiveness in one out of eight patients to whom they were implanted, the two device models were pulled back. In relation to this, the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued another hip replacement warning for a DePuy and Stryker hip replacement system .

4. “The goal is to track the more than 700,000 total hip and knee replacement surgeries that take place in the U.S. each year and, over time, record which implants failed prematurely, requiring revision surgery to fix the original operation,” David Lewallen says. He is the AJRR chairman and a professor of orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

5. The New York Times published an article earlier on the dangers of metal-on-metal hip replacements. The article was entitled “Remedy Is Elusive as Metallic Hips Fail at Fast Rate.” It discusses about how the surgery leaves metal debris that harms the tissues in the hip region. One doctor commented to the Times report that “As surgeons here sliced through tissue surrounding a failed artificial hip in a 53-year-old man, they discovered what looked like a biological dead zone. There were matted strands of tissue stained gray and black; a large strip of muscle near the hip no longer contracted.”

6. Design problems with metal-on-metal hip implants may have caused the metal components of the DePuy device to rub against each other and shed microscopic metal particles into the body.

7. “Most major medical centers have seen issues with this device,” Dr
“Most major medical centers have seen issues with this device,” Dr. Joshua J. Jacobs, the chairman of orthopedic surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, says in a newspaper interview. “This does not come as a surprise.”

8. According to medical experts, in a few years, recipients may suffer tissue damage, bone loss, implant failure,metallosis and other hip replacement problems. The symptoms of a defective hip implant are swelling, pain bearing weight, pain when rising from a seated position,pain while walking, pain on the thigh or groin area, and pain on the hip area.

9. For those who encounter any doubts and queries about their hip replacement surgery, a physician must be consulted as soon as possible.

10. The DePuy hip replacement recall should be a wake-up call to other manufacturers to check on their medical products, legal observers say. With lawsuits piling up worldwide, DePuy should duly address the hip replacement problems encountered by its clients. It should circulate a wide range of information regarding malfunctioning hip replacement symptoms so that patrons would be provided with due medical attention, legal experts say.