Slightly more than one per cent of British hip and knee replacements do not last three years, researchers reported last night.
Researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons said the findings compare "favourably" with the rest of the world.
But it also "reinforced" concerns about new surgical techniques.
Some 160,000 hip and knee replacements were performed in England and Wales in 2006.
Reporting in the journal PLoS Medicine, the researchers say they studied the records of 167,000 procedures for a four year period – linking National Joint Registry records to hospital records.
They found that one in 75 patients needed their replacements redone within three years.
But they found higher rates of failure when they studied two newish procedures of hip resurfacing and unicondylar prostheses. Both involve repair rather than full replacement and patients recover more quickly.
Researcher Jan van der Meulen and colleagues suggest: "Consideration should be given to using hip resurfacing only in male patients and unicondylar knee replacement only in elderly patients."
PLoS Med 5(8): e179. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050179
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