Two Patients Sue Zimmer Over ‘Defective’ Hip Implant

A truck driver and former nurse have filed a lawsuit against Zimmer Holdings, claiming an artificial hip socket manufactured and sold by the orthopedic device behemoth was defective and subjected them to chronic pain.

Todd Lovelace of Elizabethtown, Ky., and Christine Walker of West Palm Beach, Fla., filed their lawsuits separately in federal district courts in their respective states. Both blame the faulty hip socket for “debilitating injuries” that eventually led to the loss of their careers.

“I believed that after my hip replacement I would return to my career in nursing and to my active lifestyle with my husband of 37 years,” Walker, 53, said upon filing her lawsuit on March 11. “Instead, I live every minute of every day in pain and worry, with the loss of my career, how much more I am going to lose.”

Walker, a former nursing director, underwent hip replacement surgery in December 2007. Surgeons replaced her hip socket with the Durom Acetabular Component, also known as the Durom Cup, a device that minimizes bone removal and promised patients “an increased range of motion with greater stability.” The device was designed to bond to the hip bone. Walker’s lawsuit, however, claims the cup had the opposite effect: It resisted bone growth and popped free from the hip.

Zimmer declined to comment on the lawsuits filed by Walker and Lovelace. The company stopped selling the Durom Cup in the United States in July 2008 so it could update labeling to provide more detailed surgical technique instructions and establish a surgical training program.

Zimmer said it conducted a comprehensive review of clinical experience and product conformance to specifications in the United States and Europe and found no evidence of a defect in materials, manufacture or design of the Durom Cup. The company also said it identified surgeons who have regularly achieved success implanting the Cup; those doctors follow certain “crucial technique” steps and place the Cup in a specific way.

Lieff Cabraser Heimann &Bernstein LLP, the West Palm Beach, Fla.-based law firm that filed the lawsuits on behalf of Walker and Lovelace, claims that more than 24 percent of patients who received the Durom Cup will be forced to undergo revision surgery. Doctors performing Walker’s revision surgery in December 2008 discovered the Durom Cup had become completely detached from the hip. She still suffers from leg and hip pain, and relies on a walker to walk long distances.

Lovelace’s hip surgery left him with similar debilitating injuries, according to his lawsuit (filed Feb. 26). The 45-year-old former truck driver underwent hip replacement surgery in May 2008 but months of excruciating pain forced him to undergo a revision procedure on Dec. 22 of that year. Like Walker, the Durom Cup implanted in Lovelace had become completely loose.

“It’s ruined my life,” Lovelace said of the faulty implant. “I’m in chronic pain and have lost my job.”