Ove Furnes

Effect of Type of Bone Cement and Antibiotic Prophylaxis on Early Revision of Cemented Total Hip Replacement Presentation from the Norwegian Arthroplasty Register 1987–1996

The Norwegian Orthopaedic Association took the initiative to establish the Norwegian Hip Register in 1987. The background to this was the well-known disaster of the Christiansen (Sudmann et al. 1983) and resurfacing prostheses (Howie et al. 1990). Due to the poor results of these prostheses, many Norwegian orthopaedic surgeons started using undocumented, uncemented prostheses. The register’s main purpose was to help detect inferior implants as early as possible. After about 3 years, we observed inferior results with uncemented implants compared to cemented ones. This difference was the largest in young patients (Havelin et al. 1994). The overall short-term results of the most commonly used cemented total hip prostheses were found to be good, with a 5-year revision probability of 2.5% (Espehaug et al. 1995). However, in short-term results, the type of cement seems to be more important than the type of prosthesis. This paper presents published results on the effect on early prosthesis survival of type of bone cement and antibiotic prophylaxis.