Study finds no association between exposure to artificial TJA implants, cognitive decline
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
According to published results, no significant clinical differences were found in long-term cognitive trajectories of patients who underwent total joint arthroplasty compared with patients without total joint arthroplasty.
Maria Vassilaki, MD, PhD, and colleagues used linear mixed-effects modeling to compare the annualized rate of change in global and domain-specific cognitive scores between 952 patients who underwent total hip arthroplasty (n = 430) or total knee arthroplasty (n = 626) and a control group of 4,826 patients who did not undergo any TJA at baseline.
Overall, researchers found no differences in the rate of cognitive decline in patients who underwent TJA and patients who did not undergo TJA. They noted a “slightly faster” cognitive decline among patients who were 80 years old or older and were more than 8 years out from TKA surgery.
“Patients with TJA have long-term exposure to artificial metal-containing implants. Approximately half of patients with TJA undergo surgery before 65 years of age, and their life expectancy equates to long-term metal exposure of more than 20 years,” the researchers wrote in the study.
“No significant association was found between TJA surgery and the rate of cognitive decline, except for patients with TKA who were 80 years of age or older with more than 8 years of exposure. However, the difference was small, and the clinical significance is unclear,” they added.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts