Risk of death from hip replacement and knee decreased significantly in recent years, Newsmax Health reports.

Dutch researchers found that since the early 1990s, death rates have fallen by almost two-thirds among Danish adults having the procedures. The length of patients' hospital stays also dropped -- from more than two weeks, on average, to about one week.

Those changes, he said, include new blood-thinning medications that help prevent patients from developing potentially dangerous blood clots after surgery. Clots can, in some cases, lead to a heart attack, stroke or pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in the lungs).

For the study, lead researcher Arief Lalmohamed, of the Utrecht Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Netherlands, and his team turned to Denmark's system of national health registries. The researchers found information on more than 112,000 people who had a hip or knee replacement between 1989 and 2007.

Overall, the rate of death in the two months after surgery fell over time, from about 3.4 percent each year between 1989 and 1991 to 1.4 percent per year between 2003 and 2007, Lalmohamed said. Deaths from heart attack, stroke and pneumonia all dropped, despite the fact that heart and lung disease was more common in patients who had surgery in recent years.