Hip Resurfacing – a Guide...

Hip Resurfacing – a Guide for Patients from Durom A Solution for Young and Active Patients if you are considering a total hip replacement to minimise your pain and discomfort and improve your quality of life. Hip resurfacing is a technique designed to reline rather than replace the worn hip joint. The Durom® Hip Resurfacing System is in particular suited for young, active patients who wish to return to an active lifestyle following their operation. The hip resurfacing implant has three key advantages: Bone conservation Low wear bearing Anatomic sized bearing Bone Conservation One of the major problems of revision hip surgery (where a worn out or loose hip implant has to be changed to another one) is the loss of bone which necessitates the use of larger and longer hip stems. In hip resurfacing the head and neck are preserved. The worn surface and only 3–4 mm of bone below it are removed. This allows the patients to keep as much of their own hip as possible for as long as possible. Therefore if the resurfacing should fail for any reason the head and neck can be removed and a standard total hip replacement can be performed. Low Wear Bearing One of the major advantages of hip resurfacing is the metal-on-metal bearing. The precision-engineered components are made of a hard, biocompatible alloy (which consists mainly of cobalt and chromium) which produces very low rates of wear. The bearing used in Durom Hip Resurfacing is known as Metasul® Metal-on-Metal Tribological Solution. The Metasul bearing has been in clinical use since 1988 and over 250,000 hips with these bearings have been implanted worldwide. Anatomic Sized Bearing In a resurfaced hip the femoral head is similar in size to the natural hip. In conventional total hip replacement the average head size is smaller than the natural hip. The advantage of a larger head size is a greater range of movement of the hip and increased stability, in other words less chance of it coming out of joint (dislocating)... READ MORE