Sustained improvement seen with replacement hips

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The substantial benefits of hip replacement for osteoarthritis are sustained in the long-term, British investigators report.

The short-term effectiveness of hip replacement surgery has been well documented, Dr. Cyrus Cooper and his associates note in the medical journal Arthritis Care and Research, but there's not much information about the durability of the benefits.

In 1998, Cooper, at the University of Southampton, and his team reported the results of a study involving 643 osteoarthritis patients who underwent hip replacement in the early 1990s, and 643 matched "controls." Their current report involves follow-up for an average of another 8.3 years for 282 of the original patients and 295 controls.

According to responses to a standard questionnaire, physical function scores improved from 20 initially to 30 at follow-up in the hip replacement group, and declined from 85 to 65 in the controls.

"The long-term improvement in the physical functioning of the cases is striking when set against the decline that occurred in controls," Cooper and his associates observe.

SOURCE: Arthritis Care and Research, December 15, 2007.