One of the most common post-operative complications of tooth extraction is pain. Oral analgesics, namely loxoprofen sodium and diclofenac potassium, are often prescribed; however, the efficacy of these drugs irrespective of gender and type of extraction has not been tested. Therefore, this study aimed to compare the efficacy of these two drugs in post-dental extraction pain relief among male and female patients in cases of simple and surgical tooth extraction. A single-center, triple-blind, randomized clinical trial was conducted among 100 male and female patients who underwent tooth extraction at Taibah University Dental College and Hospital in Al-Madinah, Saudi Arabia. The patients reported their pain post-operatively after 6 hours and every 12 h for 3 days using the Verbal Descriptor Scale (e.g., "no pain", "mild pain"). Descriptive statistics and chi-square tests were run to analyze the data. An equal number of patients received either the drug loxoprofen sodium or diclofenac potassium and completed the study follow-up. Patients allocated to the diclofenac potassium drug group after 36 h were statistically significantly in their reporting of "no pain" and "mild pain" compared to patients allocated to the loxoprofen sodium group (86% vs. 66%, respectively; p = 0.019), irrespective of gender or type of tooth extraction. However, both groups demonstrated comparable (p > 0.05) post-operative pain relief over the other aforementioned allocated time intervals. In conclusion, the diclofenac potassium group had slightly better control over post-operative pain than the group receiving loxoprofen sodium.
Keywords: analgesics; efficacy; oral; pain; tooth extraction.