Hip Microscopy Morphology MORPHOLOGY OF WEAR PARTICLES OF HEAVILY CROSS LINKED POLYETHYLENE

Introduction The orthopaedic industry has expended significant research effort in recent years in reducing wear of UHMWPE articulating surface components. One such approach has been in the development of a heavily crosslinked polyethylene. Crosslinking for long has been known to improve the wear resistance of industrial polyethylene. Clinical experience for over 20 years and an increasing magnitude of laboratory studies recently have demonstrated that crosslinking extends the lifespan of total joint replacements (1-5). The objective of this study was to extract wear debris from bovine serum and to characterize wear particles released from heavily crosslinked UHMWPE cups in a physiologic hip simulator test and compared to particles released from conventional gamma sterilized UHMWPE cups. Since a certain degree of oxidation in the top layer of articulating surface is assumed to occur on shelf and in vivo, it was considered logical to artificially age the acetabular cups prior to hip simulator testing.