As per a recent study published in Journal of Endodontics, a single pretreatment dose of prednisolone showed more sustained effects in pain reduction in comparison to ketorolac or placebo.

Endodontic treatment is often painful. Therefore, dental surgeons administrate anesthesia before the dental procedures. One of such widely used analgesia is ketorolac. On the other hand, some other drugs have also evolved as analgesics like prednisolone.

Recently, a comparative study was executed to compare the effect of a single pretreatment dose of ketorolac, prednisolone, and placebo in post-endodontic pain in patients undergoing endodontic therapy. The patients with irreversible pulpitis and pulpal necrosis were included in the study. The dose of 20 mg for ketorolac and 30 mg for prednisolone was given.

A total 92 patients were selected for trial from which 46 patients were suffering from irreversible pulpitis and another 46 patients from pulpal necrosis. These patients were randomly divided into 1 of three pretreatment medication groups. Further, a visual analog scale (VAS) was used to measure pre and postoperative pain among patients at six-time intervals. Also, for evaluating comparison between different medications, one-way analysis of variance was used which was followed by the Tukey post hoc test. For assessing pain comparison within each group at various time intervals, a repeated measures analysis of variance was executed, which was followed by the paired t-test and Bonferroni correction.

The results showed that at the end of 6 hours, ketorolac group showed an effective reduction in pain scores among irreversible pulpitis cases compared with other drugs. Whereas, at the end of 12 hours, prednisolone group showed significantly reduced pain scores in comparison to other drugs.

Overall, it was found that a single pretreatment dose of prednisolone showed more sustained effects in pain reduction in comparison to ketorolac or placebo