J&J Must Pay $8.3 Million Over Defective Hip, Jury Says

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)’s DePuy unit defectively designed a metal-on-metal hip implant and was negligent, a California jury decided in the first of 10,750 lawsuits over the device to go to trial.

The Los Angeles jury awarded $8.3 million in compensatory damages to Loren “Bill” Kransky, a retired prison guard from Montana, after finding that the design of the ASR XL hip caused his injuries.

“This is not an imperfect hip, this is a public health disaster,” Kransky’s attorney Michael Kelly said in closing arguments on Feb. 28 after a five-week trial. “Somebody needs to tell them, ‘Don’t make Bill Kransky come to court. Build these things right. Don’t let this happen again.’”

Read the full story here.

This is no surprise to us as Mr McMinn outlined the deficiencies of the ASR design to multiple congresses of orthopaedic surgeons and his criticisms of the ASR have been on The McMinn Centre website since 2005.

Watch the Northern Lights Debate.

Some information has come to light since 2005.

Much more is now known about why DePuy obtained black debris from the BHR component on hip simulator. Essentially the BHR cup in these experiments was inadvertently deformed prior to the simulator experiments.

Modern Hip Resurfacing Chapter 4

It is now known that multiple thermal treatments give increased wear and increased implant failure. The ASR cup used in both the ASR resurfacing and the ASR XL total hip replacement is a multiply thermal treated component.

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The aspect of the ASR that was unknown in 2005 and since has become a major issue is that when used as a total hip replacement (ASR XL) failure of the head-neck taper contributes greatly to the clinical failure rates. Several publications have appeared on this issue but this was raised by Mr McMinn in 2010 in a British Orthopaedic Association (BOA) lecture, which has been present since on the McMinn Centre website.

Watch Mr McMinn’s BOA Lecture here.

Meanwhile the BHR continues to demonstrate excellent long-term results. Our latest publication shows our BHR results out to 13 years and soon we will be publishing our 15 year results which are excellent.

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