Knee Replacements Jump for Older Adults

Knee replacement operations on older adults have risen 162% in the last 20 years, a new study finds. Many had to be repeated. Second operations such as these doubled. Medicare spends about $15,000 on each knee replacement. All of these numbers will only go up as baby boomers get older. Researchers used Medicare data for their study. Medicare patients had 243,802 knee replacements in 2010. There were 93,230 in 1991. Some people needed “revisions,” or second surgeries. The number of these procedures doubled, from 9,650 to 19,871. The average hospital stay for knee replacement was cut in half during these two decades. But there were more problems afterward for people who had revision surgeries. They were twice as likely to need a second hospital stay after surgery as patients in 1991. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the study September 26.