A Missouri patient has filed a DePuy metal hip implant lawsuit, joining many other patients who say that the artificial hip’s metal-on-metal design poses health dangers.

Plaintiff Donald B. says that he had a total hip replacement on Jan. 12, 2005, and was implanted with a DePuy Pinnacle Hip Replacement System. He says that on April 23, 2018, he had to undergo revision surgery of the replacement hip because the implant had failed and caused him to develop metallosis, or overly high levels of metal in his blood.

He says that the device was defective because it had a metal-on-metal desing, meaning that the hip was composed with a metal component rubbing against another metal component, as opposed to a metal component rubbing against a plastic component, as is usually the case in hip replacements.

He says that this device caused a range of problems, because if the ball-and-socket sides of the hip implant are not situated exactly in one spot when they were implanted, as is often the case in a hip replacement surgery, they would rub together and wear incorrectly.

The DePuy metal hip implant lawsuit argues that the incorrect wearing of the metal-on-metal design causes metal fragments to fret off of the implant and enter a patient’s body. Allegedly, this can cause metallosis, or the elevation of metal levels in a patient’s blood, and can cause infection in the soft tissue and bone.

Additionally, as the metal components wear incorrectly and metal wears away from the implant, the device can allegedly not fit together well over time, causing a patient pain and difficulty moving.

The metal-on-metal hip implant class action lawsuit goes on to say that these defects caused Donald serious physical, mental, emotional and financial injury. Allegedly, he suffered pain and metallosis as a result of the implant, and had to have a revision surgery.

The DePuy metal-on-metal hip implant lawsuit notes that revision surgeries pose additional injury to patients because of the physical trauma of having a second surgery, and because revision surgeries for hip implants pose more risks than initial surgeries.

Allegedly, patients undergoing revision surgery for a hip implant surgery have a higher risk of infection during or after surgery than patients do who are having their hip replaced for the first time. Additionally, patients undergoing revision surgery allegedly have a higher risk of the implantation of the device not being successful.

Donald argues that DePuy knew or should have known that the metal-on-metal design of the DePuy metal hip implant was defective and posed a danger to patients, but released the design onto the market nonetheless.

He says that the company had the device approved through a “fast track” FDA approval process that allows new medical devices onto the market without the normal pre-market testing if they are “substantially equivalent” to devices already on the market.

However, Donald argues that the devices that were named as “substantially equivalent” to the DePuy metal hip implant were metal-on-polymer implants and not metal-on-metal ones, so the device was released onto the market without having been tested to see how the metal-on-metal design element would fare in patients.

The Missouri DePuy Metal Hip Implant is Case No. 3:18-cv-02348-K, in the U.S. District Court for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.