Mr. Wang living at Jiu Xian Qiao, Chaoyang District had a hip fracture in 1998 and walked with a limp after treatment. In March this year, he began to suffer from irregular pain around the area of fracture, sometimes in his outer thigh, sometimes in his knees, and the pain grew much intense and piercing when he sat down. Later, he was diagnosed to have traumatic arthritis and high blood pressure, and he has been taking blood pressure drugs in recent years. Is the traumatic arthritis a drug-induced bone disease, or it is due to lack of calcium caused by phenytoin sodium he takes? How can it be treated? 

According to Xu Hui, Chief Physician of Orthopaedics of Beijing Jishuitan Hospital, the patient has been suffering from lower limb lameness after the trauma in 1998 and could have injured his hip joint at the time. After so many years, traumatic arthritis has struck his hip joint, and the worsening change is induced from the trauma he suffered from in 1998. Doctor Xu suggests an X-ray check to look at the changes in the bones. If the joint damage is not serious and the patient does not show serious symptoms, conservative treatment methods can be applied, which include restrictions on activities to avoid excessive activity leading to pain, increase in non-weight-bearing activities to exercise the cartilage, such as swimming, taking appropriate dosage of non-steroidal drugs to alleviate the symptoms and taking some cartilage-nutritious drugs to slow down the worsening effect.  

If the hip joint is shown to have had serious changes, and the symptoms are serious, the whole hip joint should be replaced to ensure quick recovery of the disease and resumption to normal life. 

The change is not associated with drug-taking or lack of calcium. And his high blood pressure, with effective control, won’t pose a serious treat to the success of the operation.