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An exploratory analysis of the LoDoCo2 (Low-Dose Colchicine 2) randomized, controlled, double-blind trial found that daily therapy with a low dose of colchicine was associated with lower incidences of both total knee replacement and total hip replacement surgeries. Osteoarthritis is an increasingly common joint disease that can be associated with low-grade inflammation in response to weight-bearing traumatic injury. Previous studies have demonstrated an association between the use of anti-inflammatory therapies and the slowing of osteoarthritis disease progression. Colchicine is effective in many inflammatory and fibrotic conditions, but it is not currently recommended for treatment of osteoarthritis. Its long-term effects have...

WWE legend Scott Hall will be taken off life support, his friend and fellow NWO founder, Kevin Nash, announced on Sunday. “Scott’s on life support. Once his family is in place they will discontinue life support,” Nash wrote in an emotional tribute to Hall on Instagram, adding an old photo of the pair laughing together. Hall was put on life support after he suffered three heart attacks Saturday during complications from hip replacement surgery, according to PW Torch. Hall, 63, was at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Ga. to repair a broken hip after he sustained a fall. Hall has...

GPs are being paid millions by the NHS to ration referrals for operations, scans and even cancer tests, an investigation reveals today. Family doctors are being offered the financial incentives in a bid to slash the number of patients they send to hospital for a variety of procedures. The incentives mostly cover non-urgent referrals for hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, hearing tests and abdomen scans. But two health trusts have included urgent cancer scans in their schemes, and another two covered heart tests. Patient groups said the payments were ‘profoundly wrong’, while one MP likened them to ‘bribes’. Doctors’...

GENEVA (AP) -- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry broke his leg in a bicycle crash Sunday, apparently after hitting a curb, and scrapped the rest of a four-nation trip that included an international conference on combating the Islamic State group. Kerry was in stable condition and in good spirits as he prepared to return to Boston for further treatment with the doctor who previously operated on his hip, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said. He said X-rays at a Swiss hospital confirmed that Kerry fractured his right femur. "The secretary is stable and never lost consciousness, his injury...

If you're unlucky enough to be stricken with a rare medical condition, you'd better hope your doctor watches the right television show. That was the lesson for one German man with severe heart failure and a puzzling mix of symptoms including fever, near blindness, near deafness, reflux and enlarged lymph nodes, which baffled doctors for months. All of the symptoms had appeared in the last year, after the man underwent a hip replacement to replace a faulty ceramic hip. The 55-year-old man was diagnosed only when he was referred to Dr. Juergen Schaefer, a fan of the U.S. television medical...

Michael Shopenn’s artificial hip was made by a company based in this remote town, a global center of joint manufacturing. But he had to fly to Europe to have it installed. Mr. Shopenn, 67, an architectural photographer and avid snowboarder, had been in such pain from arthritis that he could not stand long enough to make coffee, let alone work. He had health insurance, but it would not cover a joint replacement because his degenerative disease was related to an old sports injury, thus considered a pre-existing condition. Desperate to find an affordable solution, he reached out to a sailing...

THERE is nothing like a new hip or knee to put the spring back in your step. Patients receiving joint implants often are able to resume many of the physical activities they love, even those as vigorous as tennis and hiking. No wonder, then, that joint replacement is growing in popularity. In the United States in 2007, surgeons performed about 806,000 hip and knee implants (the joints most commonly replaced), double the number performed a decade earlier. Though these procedures have become routine, they are not fail-safe. Implants must sometimes be replaced, said Dr. Henrik Malchau, an orthopedic surgeon at...

“I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost,” Obama said in the interview. “I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother.” Obama said “you just get into some very difficult moral issues” when considering whether “to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill. “That’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” he said in the April 14 interview. “The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of...

Rest assured heath care rationing for seniors is coming. It is happening in the UK and Canada where certain procedures are simply denied at a certain age or interminable waits face those who need care. Rationing to control costs is just the nature of government run health care. The poster child for excessive costs is hip replacements for the elderly. And they will be on the chopping block. Obama himself suggested pain pills might have been a better alternative for his grandmother than a hip replacement she had been considering. But for those who have suffered hip problems, it is...

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Penn State coach Joe Paterno had successful hip replacement surgery Sunday, a day after the Nittany Lions clinched the Big Ten title and a trip to the Rose Bowl. The 81-year-old coach was expected to get back on his feet Monday following the procedure at Mount Nittany Medical Center, the team said in a statement. Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli, the school's director of athletic medicine, led the surgical team. Joe Paterno expects to recover in time for the Rose Bowl and reiterated after Saturday's game that he intends to return in 2009. "Dr. Sebastianelli reports that all...

For two years, Frances Kinley-Manton says she lived with arthritis pain in her hips, a condition that kept her in a wheelchair. She wanted hip replacement surgery. But doctors at Britain's National Health Service said she was too fat for the operation. "They wouldn't even put me on a waiting list," Kinley-Manton recalled. Her doctor told the 210-pound woman to lose about 30 pounds before he would consider her for surgery. Unable to drop the weight through dieting, the 68-year-old Scotland resident took out a mortgage on her house to pay for a private operation on the Mediterranean island of...

Patients in some areas who need hip replacements and other orthopaedic operations are still having to wait more than two years for NHS treatment, figures show. Almost one in four waits longer than 12 months for an operation after referral by their GP. For 3 per cent, the delay is twice that. The average wait is 40 weeks - ten weeks longer than across all specialties. The figures on Health Service performance were published as part of a progress report on the Government's pledge to treat all patients in 18 weeks. Just 35 per cent of those needing hospital admission...