Women should not be offered hip resurfacing procedures in view of the high failure rate of the operation, researchers say today.
The procedure spares the femoral head of the thigh bone – but the failure rate of the procedure is five times greater for women than other kinds of hip operation, according to the new analysis.
The findings come from an analysis of more than 400,000 hip operations in England and Wales during an eight year period in the last ten years.
Some 32,000 of these involved resurfacing, according to a report in The Lancet.
The researchers said the only resurfacing procedure to show success rates as good as total hip replacement involved men with large femoral heads, representing about 5,000 of the operations studied.
Researcher Professor Ashley Blom, an orthopaedic surgeon at Bristol University, said: "Resurfacing failure rates in women were unacceptably high. In view of these findings, we recommend that resurfacing procedures are not undertaken in women.
"Our findings show that resurfacings with smaller head sizes are prone to early failure, and in particular that resurfacing in women has much worse implant survival, irrespective of head size."
The Lancet October 2 2012
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