DePuy ASR and Pinnacle Hip Systems Raise Concerns of Metal Poisoning

Over the past five months, more than 500 lawsuits have been filed in federal court over DePuy Pinnacle hip problems, which caused individuals to experience severe pain and early failure of their artificial hip implant.In May 2011, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered that every DePuy Pinnacle Lawsuit filed in any U.S. District Court throughout the country be transferred to the Northern District of Texas as part of a multidistrict litigation, or MDL. At that time, the panel identified only three cases that had been filed.To put this in perspective, another DePuy artificial hip, the DePuy ASR hip implant, had been the subject of 1,195 AERs by August 2010, when it was recalled because of an unexpectedly high early failure rate. There’s no reason to suspect that the Pinnacle hip replacement lawsuits would not surpass the ASR in number.

Early failures with the DePuy hip appear to also be related to the design of the ASR acetabular cup, which is shallower than acetabular cups made by other companies. This has made it prone to failure, loosening and other DePuy Hip complications. Design problems with metal-on-metal hip implants, and particularly the DePuy ASR hip and DePuy Pinnacle,
can cause the metal components to rub against each other and shed microscopic metal particles into the body. Reactions to these metal particles can cause soft tissue damage, cause inflammatory reactions and lead to bone loss. This can compromise the hip replacement, potentially leading to the need for painful and risky hip revision surgery.

Specialized blood tests can be used to detect levels of toxic metal in DePuy hip implant patients. In some cases, patients have been found with 100 times the normal level of chromium and cobalt in the body.The metal particles shed from metal-on-metal hip replacement implants can increase the amount of some metals in the blood, such as chromium and cobalt. This can lead to metallosis, a type of blood poisoning, and genotoxicity, which can lead to genetic damage. Chromium and cobalt have also been linked to cancer, and could lead to the development of tumors.