Personal Injury Law

First Depuy Hip Replacement Lawsuit Has Started

Many people across the country and right here in Tennessee have heard about the recent hip replacement recalls either on the news, in the newspaper, or on the Internet. This recall started after many complaints were reported about problems with hip replacement and a need for more surgery to fix the problems. As with many other recalls of a widely used product or device, we knew lawsuits would start being filed. If you or someone you know has suffered after a hip replacement surgery, you should contact a Tennessee defective product lawyer right away to see if you may be entitled to compensation.

In this case, Kathleen Margenau from Florida has started the first lawsuit against DePuy Orthopedic, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, because of her hip implant failure. The lawsuit claims that Margenau received a DePuy ASR acetabular cup in March 2008 and started experiencing ?extreme weakness in her hip and quadriceps? following her surgery. A little more than a year after her surgery, Margenau had to have a second surgery to remove the implant and the doctors claimed that the device had,? catastrophically failed." After the surgery for another hip replacement, Margenau was not able to return to her once active lifestyle.

The lawsuit also claims that during this time, Depuy knew about the high failure rate of their ASR cups but failed to provide Margenau or her surgeons with this information and because of this, ?her surgeon had little reason to believe that her pain or weakness was a result of the ASR cup?. The manufacturers decided to phase out the Depuy implant earlier this spring after realizing that reports showed a ?higher than expected? rate for failure than traditional implants, which last fifteen years or more, and showed that people with small bodies or weak bones were more at risk for an implant failure.

These hip replacements have been criticized for having received more than three hundred complaints and for the company being slow to remove the product from the U.S. Market. The DePuy issued a brochure in 2009 about proper ASR positioning but the brochure did not specifically state concerns about the ASR until March of this year. Margenau lawsuit was filed in the United States Federal District Court for Middle District of Florida the Ft. Myers Division.

Full post as published by Tennessee Law Blog on September 15, 2010 (boomark / email).