Third-body-wear as a risk factor in joint endoprosthetics

It is well known, that wear of the articulation partners of hip joint prostheses affect the long-term durability of the implants in vivo. The wear is dramatically increased if particles in the artificial joint gap act as third body. Those particles can also occur after a fracture of a ceramic component. Until now there are some different guidelines which coupling (metal-polyethylene, ceramic-polyethylene, ceramic-ceramic) should be used for revision. We tested and compared the wear behaviour of a ceramic-PE-pairing and a ceramic-ceramic-pairing under third body wear conditions with alumina-particles in a hip joint simulator.