Why Do Knee Implants Fail? Is it the Patient, the Surgeon, or the Device itself?

  
 
 
Why Do Knee Implants Fail? (Biloine Young @ OTW)
How often do total knee arthroplasties fail? And why do they? Richard D. Scott, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, Boston, tells his patients that their implants are “not like a battery. You are going to have a definite reoperation rate that starts at year one, and goes [up] at about 0.5% per year for the first 25 years.”
As reported on the Ortho SuperSite, Scott has undertaken a 27-year study of 4,222 consecutive primary posterior cruciate-retaining total knee arthroplasty (TKA) cases consisting of 3,432 fixed bearing and 790...