Risks

Risks associated with hip replacement surgery can include:

• Blood clots. Clots can form in your leg veins after surgery. This can be dangerous because a piece of a clot can break off and travel to your lung, heart or, rarely, your brain. Your doctor may prescribe blood-thinning medications to reduce this risk.
• Infection. Infections can occur at the site of your incision and in the deeper tissue near your new hip. Most infections are treated with antibiotics, but a major infection near your prosthesis might require surgery to remove and replace the prosthesis.
• Fracture. During surgery, healthy portions of your hip joint might fracture. Sometimes the fractures are small enough to heal on their own, but larger fractures might need to be stabilized with wires, screws, and possibly a metal plate or bone grafts.
• Dislocation. Certain positions can cause the ball of your new joint to come out of the socket, particularly in the first few months after surgery. If the hip dislocates, your doctor might fit you with a brace to keep the hip in the correct position. If your hip keeps dislocating, surgery is often required to stabilize it.
• Change in leg length. Your surgeon takes steps to avoid the problem, but occasionally a new hip makes one leg longer or shorter than the other. Sometimes this is caused by a contracture of muscles around the hip. In this case, progressively strengthening and stretching those muscles might help. You're not likely to notice, small differences in leg length after a few months.
• Loosening. Although this complication is rare with newer implants, your new joint might not become solidly fixed to your bone or might loosen over time, causing pain in your hip. Surgery might be needed to fix the problem.
• Nerve damage. Rarely, nerves in the area where the implant is placed can be injured. Nerve damage can cause numbness, weakness and pain.

Need for second hip replacement

Your prosthetic hip joint might wear out eventually, especially if you have hip replacement surgery when you're relatively young and active. Then you might need a second hip replacement. However, new materials are making implants last longer.