Stryker Orthopaedics has been named in at least five new hip replacement lawsuits involving its allegedly defective Accolade Hip Stem and LFIT V40 Femoral Head components. According to a report published by HarrisMartin.com, cases filed in recent weeks include two in the U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, as well as claims that are now pending in the District of Massachusetts, District of Alaska, and the Western District of Alaska.
All of the cases were filed on behalf of individuals who were forced to undergo revision surgery within just a few years of their initial hip replacement. Plaintiffs claim that the combination of the Accolade Stem and LFIT V40 Femoral Head resulted in metallosis, adverse local tissue reactions, heavy metal toxicity and other debilitating complications that ultimately caused the premature failure of their implants.
According to the complaints, Stryker issued an “Urgent Medical Device Product Field Action Notification” in August 2016 to announce a recall for certain large-diameter LFIT V40 Femoral Heads due to reports of taper lock failure. Such an occurrence may result in:
Plaintiffs further assert that the Accolade/ LFIT V40 Femoral Head configuration has been “reported to cause corrosion.” However, in marketing the components, Stryker and other defendants allegedly “represented and warranted that proprietary materials alleviate concerns for this problem.”
These five cases were only the most recent filed in the wake of Stryker’s LFT40 Femoral Head recall. On January 13, 2017, plaintiffs involved in this growing litigation filed a motion with the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation seeking centralization of all such federal claims in a single U.S. District Court for the purposes of coordinated pretrial proceedings. They contend that the litigation involving the component could eventually include thousands of similar cases, as LFIT V40 Femoral Heads are used in combination with at least six Stryker modular hip replacements. As such, it is estimated that more than 100,000 of these components may have been implanted in patients worldwide.