Doctors in Oxford are pioneering important new consumer tests to find out how effective different knee replacements are.

A team at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre is using a grant of £136,725 from the Arthritis Research Campaign to devise a way of measuring growing numbers of replacements on the market.

Consultant orthopaedic surgeon David Murray said: "There are currently about 40 different knee replacements available on the market in the UK, and that number is rapidly increasing.

"The majority have no published results, and while most work very well, some will be unsatisfactory with long-term failure rates, and a few may be a disaster.

"New knee replacements are usually released on to the market after only one or two years of clinical assessment, which is unlikely to identify problems, so unsatisfactory knees will continue to be introduced." Mr Murray added: "It's essential that we implement better systems of early assessment."

His team has already developed a system which can assess hip replacements and predict how well they will perform long-term. The team will now dev- elop a similar system for knee replace- ments, at first studying 75 patients who have had succ- essful knee op- erations.

About 30,000 people in the UK have knee replacement surgery each year.

Story date: Wednesday 13 January

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