A DePuy ASR settlement is now available to compensate hip replacement patients who received an ASR implant and underwent revision surgery.

The DePuy ASR settlement concerning the metal-on-metal ASR hip prosthetic originally occurred in August 2012 and was intended to settle three pending lawsuits with awards of $200,000 each.

Since that time, Johnson & Johnson Inc., parent company to DePuy Orthopedics, has racked up ASR hip implant lawsuits to the tune of about 8,000 or better.

Attorneys familiar with the litigation estimate that qualifying claimants in the DePuy ASR settlement amount may receive payments between $200,000 and $500,000.

The DePuy ASR settlement was set up to be distributed in phases. An earlier agreement was reached on Nov. 13, 2013 and was slated to compensate U.S. patients who had to have their ASR XL acetabular hip system or prosthesis unit removed and replaced in a revision surgery prior to Aug. 31 of that same year, 2013.

The second DePuy ASR settlement agreement or phase was reached on March 2, 2015. This agreement sought to compensate U.S. patients who also had the revision surgery to remove and replace their ASR XL acetabular hip resurfacing system from Aug. 31, 2013 clear through Jan. 31, 2015—a one-year and five-month time window.

The third and most recent DePuy ASR settlement phase is not based on new settlement terms but rather a decision to extend the time window of the second DePuy ASR settlement for another 24 months and fifteen days.

This new time window is from Jan. 31, 2015 to Feb. 15, 2017 for U.S. patients who had revision surgeries to remove and replace their ASR XL acetabular hip prosthesis. The extension was agreed to in early March of 2017 and is known as the “2017 ASR Extension Agreement.”

Problems Reported with the DePuy ASR XL Acetabular Hip System

The DePuy ASR XL acetabular hip system is a metal-on-metal hip prosthetic with articulating femoral head and acetabular liner made of cobalt and chromium.

Like other metal-on-metal hip prosthetics such as the DePuy Pinnacle hip system, it has been blamed for a multitude of problems, leading to a massive voluntary recall by the DePuy company involving 93,000 globally distributed units. The U.S. recall involved 37,000 units.

Shortly after the voluntary recall was initiated by DePuy, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it as a Class 2 medical device recall.

In announcing the ASR recall, the FDA cited data collected by the United Kingdom (UK) joint registry that indicated a failure rate of approximately 13% of ASR prosthetic recipients.

The adverse side effects reported with the DePuy ASR XL acetabular prosthetic include toxic levels of chromium and cobalt in the blood due to a shedding of metal debris at the implantation site. Toxic debris such as this can increase the chances of developing certain types of cancer as well as heart disease.

Around some patients’ implantation area, pseudotumors developed and led to severe inflammation, pain, and in extreme cases, tissue death, bone tissue loss, and the need for complete removal and replacement.