Death Rate After Hip, Knee Replacements Has Dropped Sharply: Study (HealthDay)
Experts credit advances in post-surgical care for lower risk
The risk of death from hip- or knee-replacement surgery has dropped substantially in recent years, a large new study finds.
Dutch researchers found that since the early 1990s, death rates have fallen by almost two-thirds among Danish adults having the procedures. The length of patients' hospital stays also dropped -- from more than two weeks, on average, to about one week.
The study did not dig into the reasons for the improvements, but it's likely that changes in post-surgical care have had a big impact, said lead researcher Arief Lalmohamed, of the Utrecht Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Netherlands.
Those changes, he said, include new blood-thinning medications that help prevent patients from developing potentially dangerous blood clots after surgery. Clots can, in some cases, lead to a heart attack, stroke or pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in the lungs).
In the United States, more than 1 million people have a hip or knee replacement each year, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The surgery often is prompted b...
