South African arthroplasty surgeons commonly make use of new bearing surface technology. This new technology only has short term, industry funded clinical trials or simulator studies available to prove its performance and motivate its use. These products are being used despite the availability of conventional components with proven long term in vivo efficacy. In the light of the recent Du Puy ASR recall, which also showed initial good clinical results, we reviewed the available data on some of the new available bearing surface technology. We performed a literature search to identify the best available clinical data regarding duration of follow up and number of patients for a selection of new bearing surfaces and compared it to well known long term clinical follow up studies and joint registry data of conventional products.Purpose
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