Stryker Rejuvenate and ABG II Hip Implant Lawsuits Go to Minnesota Judge
A June 12, 2013 Court Order assigned lawsuits involving the Stryker modular neck hip implant recall to United States District Judge Donovan W. Frank in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The National Judicial Panel for the federal courts had been considering attorneys petitions to centralize all of the lawsuits involving the recalled Stryker Rejuvenate and ABG II hip implants before a single judge.
This procedure is called multidistrict litigation under the federal court rules. It is not a class action. It merely coordinates all of the individual lawsuits before a single judge to avoid conflicting rulings on the same issues. It also helps to coordinate the progress of all of the cases together in the discovery process. Multidistrict litigation is very common in medical product or drug recall cases where there are many lawsuits over a defect or recall in a single product. The legal issues about the safety of the product and what the manufacturer knew and when they knew it are common issues to all of the cases. Each person who was injured by the product may have somewhat different injuries and financial losses but the legal liability of the Company is likely to be the same in all of the cases.
The federal multidistrict judge will set up a schedule to move the cases forward towards trial and also supervise and encourage the parties efforts to settle the lawsuits.
The Stryker Rejuvenate and ABG II hip implants were recalled in July of 2012 after being on the market for less than three years. These products are designed with a modular neck between the stem in the femur and the ball that goes into a cup that is set in the pelvis. This modular neck was designed to allow the surgeon to pick different lengths and angles for the modular neck to try to get the best alignment and leg length for the artificial hip. Prior implant designs merely had a stem in the femur and a ball that could be placed on the end of the femur stem.
Our lawsuits against Stryker allege that the modular neck design was defective and negligent because the multiple joints involved can move slightly causing damage to the metal, corrosion and leaching of cobalt and chromium into the patients hip tissue and blood stream. This metal poisoning is called metallosis. When the hip tissues become damaged by the metallosis the hip must be removed in an operation call a hip revision and a new hip implanted.
A new article in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery confirms the same theory that we are alleging in our lawsuits. The 2013 article is titled Adverse Local Tissue Reaction Arising from Corrosion at the Femoral Neck-Body Junction in a Dual-Taper Stem with a Cobalt-Chromium Modular Neck. The article was written by H. John Cooper, MD, Robert M. Urban, PhD, Richard L. Wixson, MD, R. Michael Meneghini, MD, and Joshua J. Jacobs, MD.
The peer reviewed scientific article was based upon a case study of 12 hip implants involving the Stryker Rejuvenate and ABG II hip implants that had failed. There are a number of earlier medical studies that had suggested this risk years before that should have put Stryker on notice that a modular neck design would have these problems but Stryker marketed the product anyway. This is one of the key reasons why we believe Stryker should be held liable in the lawsuits.
Read more about the Stryker Rejuvenate at Stryker Hip lawsuit Website