“Severe” wear challenge to 36 mm mechanically enhanced highly crosslinked polyethylene hip liners

Our purpose was to compare the wear performance of mechanically enhanced 5Mrad highly crosslinked polyethylene (MEP, ArComXL®) hip liners to (control) 3Mrad UHMWPE liners (ArCom®) in 36 mm head size. As a more severe synergy of clinically relevant test models, we contrasted wear with custom roughened Co–Cr surfaces (Ra 500 nm) to the standard pristine Co–Cr heads (Ra < 20 nm) using a severe microseparation test mode in our hip simulator. We adopted a previously published model to estimate potential biological activity. On new Co–Cr heads, the MEP liners showed a 47% reduction in volumetric wear a 13% reduction in wear particle size and a 27% reduction in Functional Biological Activity (FBA) compared to our control. On rough Co–Cr heads, the MEP liners showed little advantage in terms of volumetric wear compared with the control. However, the MEP liners overall showed a 38% reduction in FBA compared to the control owing to a larger volume fraction of larger particles. Thus overall the MEP liners appeared to offer advantages in terms of reduced FBA indices. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part B: Appl Biomater, 2008