A Study on Efficacy of Preemptive Analgesia: A Comparison on Efficacy of Preoperative and Postoperative Analgesic Administration

Jung, Young Soo; Kim, Moon Key; Park, Hyung Sik; Lee, Eui Wung; Kang, Jeong Wan

Abstract

BACKGROUND
Studies on the pain have been dealing with many different ways for last several centuries. Especially, preemptive analgesia is being used as a method to control the postoperative pain. Many studies on its efficacy have been processed in different ways about various drugs, administration methods and times for various operations. And the value of preemptive analgesia are still controversial regarding the results of other clinical studies. The authors performed a clinical study on efficacy of preemptive analgesia using an non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) for the surgical extraction of impacted third molar teeth and present the more effective pain treatment after oral surgery with literature review.
METHODS
Using a randomized double blind test design, this study compared the analgesic efficacies of an NSAID, Talniflumate 370 mg. This drug administrated first either 1 hour preoperatively (experimental group) or when the pain developed moderately to severely over 5 scale of verbal rating scales (0-10) to respective 30 patients undergoing the removal of impacted third molars. Pain intensity and the time from the end of surgery were assessed postoperatively whenever the patients demanded additional drug over 5 scale for forty eight hours using same verbal rating scales.
RESULTS
The sex distribution, the age of the patients, and the time required for surgery in two groups were similar. The average first time for demanding additional drug after surgery was 163.9 minutes in experimental group and 191.5 minutes in control group. At this time, the average pain intensity was 5.8 in experimental group and 6.1 in control group. And the average second time for demanding additional drug was 365.8 minutes in experimental group and 351.8 minutes in control group. At this time, the average pain intensities were 6.6 in experimental group and 6.2 in control group. No statistically significant difference was found between the average first times and second times, and the average pain intensities at first and second times in two groups.
CONCLUSIONS
From these results the efficacy of preemptive analgesia used in this study was not appeared. This clinical study indicates that many NSAIDs administrated preoperatively in present practices have weak efficacy of preemptive analgesia for postoperative pain, thus the authors recommend that only postoperative analgesics are adequate without preoperative use of analgesics.