A new patient joins a multi-district DePuy Pinnacle hip lawsuit, claiming the hip replacement’s metal-on-metal design is defective and dangerous and that the device’s makers knowingly sold a dangerous and defective medical device to patients and medical professionals.

Plaintiff Thomas B. says that he had his right hip replaced by a DePuy Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip replacement on or around Feb. 8, 2010, in Garden City, Kan. He claims that after his hip replacement, he began experiencing symptoms including pain in and around his right hip, a mechanical squeaking in the right hip, dislocation of the replacement femoral head from the socket, bone fracture, instability, and metallosis.

Thomas goes on to claim that as a result of the design’s defect and resulting complications, he was forced to undergo two dangerous and painful revision surgeries to remove the DePuy Pinnacle hip and address the metallosis, the metallosis psudotumor, tissue damage, and bone fracture he experienced because of the design’s defects.

Thomas claims that these symptoms were the result of a severe design defect in the Pinnacle hip that made the device unusable and dangerous to patients. Allegedly, the fact that the Pinnacle hip is designed with a metal femoral head and a metal hip socket as opposed to two hip components with different materials causes the metal pieces to rub on one another and wear incorrectly.

The excessive wearing that Thomas claims occurs can allegedly cause metal fragments from the hip to fret off of the device and into a patient’s body. This can then cause the patient to develop metallosis, or dangerously high metal levels in their blood. Additionally, this can cause the area around the hip to become infected, and can cause tissue death.

Thomas claims that the design of the Pinnacle hip is such that unless the two components are placed in exactly the right relationship to one another, they wear incorrectly, allegedly a common occurrence in surgical hip replacements. In addition to releasing harmful metal into a patient’s body, this wearing then causes the pieces to become misaligned, causing movement difficulty, the “clicking” that Thomas experienced, as well as possible bone fracture and bone death.

In his claim in the DePuy Pinnacle hip lawsuit, Thomas aims to hold DePuy Orthopedics Inc., Johnson & Johnson, as well as Johnson & Johnson’s affiliate companies liable for his injuries. He claims that the companies knew or should have known that the device was dangerous and defective, because other metal on metal hip replacements have failed previously due to comparable problems and are no longer currently seen as safe options by the medical community.

He claims that they released the DePuy Pinnacle hip it onto the market without sufficient research. The medical device makers improperly relied on a “fast track” approval process by the Food and Drug Administration to release the device onto the market without subjecting it to sufficient testing, alleges Thomas.

The DePuy Pinnacle Hip Lawsuit is Case No. 3:18-cv-02063-K, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division.