• Posted March 12, 2025

Spouses Also Benefit From Partner's Knee/Hip Replacement

Knee or hip replacement is a major surgery, and many people must lean hard on their spouses to care for them during weeks to months of recuperation.

But all that hassle is absolutely worthwhile for the one providing care for their temporarily disabled partner, a new study suggests.

Spouses experience significant improvements in their quality of life following their partner’s knee or hip replacement procedure, researchers reported at a meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons this week in San Diego.

“It is well studied that the patient's quality of life improves following surgery, but now we know it will also improve for spouses,” lead researcher Dr. Nicolas Jozefowski, a recent graduate of Loyola University School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a news release.

“Most spouses assume a caregiving role when their partner has joint replacement surgery and they are sacrificing a bit in terms of their quality of life, but we can show it will improve with these data,” Jozefowski added. “Patients can have less pain, and couples can do more things together."

Joint replacement surgery has become more common as the U.S. population grows and ages, researchers said in background notes. 

About 544,000 total hip replacements and 790,000 total knee replacements take place each year.

In fact, the surgery has become so rote that it’s now performed mostly on an outpatient basis, with patients leaving the hospital under their own steam within hours of the procedure.

That means that spouses have become the primary caregivers following joint replacement surgery, shifting the responsibility of nursing a patient through recovery to their families, researchers said.

Spouses of people in chronic pain tend to have a lower quality of life and higher levels of depression, researchers noted. 

The point of the new study was to see if this was also true among spouses of joint replacement patients.

For the study, researchers surveyed 100 spouses of joint replacement patients -- 50 involving hip replacement and 50 involving knee replacement. The survey was completed an average of about 2 years following the surgery.

About 70% of spouses said their quality of life was slightly or significantly better following their partner’s hip replacement.

Likewise, 76% of spouses of knee replacement patients reported improved quality of life, results show.

On a 1 to 5 scale for how often their spouse needs assistance, running from “never” to “always,” spouses of hip replacement patients responded with an average 1.4 at least one year after surgery.

Spouses of knee replacement patients returned an average 1.8 when rating the assistance they continued to render their partner at least a year after surgery.

Jozefowski said surgeons can use the findings to counsel patients and spouses on what to expect.

"A lot of times what we see in clinical practice is it is the spouse that prompts the patient to seek care for a variety of reasons, such as not being able to do everyday activities," senior researcher Dr. Nicholas Brown, an associate professor with Loyola Medicine, said in a news release.

"This study further validates the effectiveness of knee and hip replacements for patients' pain and well-being, as well as those around them,” Brown said. “It confirms the transformational power of this surgery and the ways it benefits their spouses and families."

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The National Institutes of Health has more on joint replacement surgery.

SOURCE: American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, news release, March 10, 2025