A clinical trial demonstrated that a low dose of etoricoxib (60 mg) has a significant pre-emptive pain-relieving effect, leading to minimized use of analgesics following third molar removal. Long Xie et al. conducted the study for exploring the efficacy of etoricoxib to alleviate pain after third molar surgery.

In this parallel, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial, 56 participants were randomly allocated to receive 60 mg etoricoxib (n=28) or placebo (n=28) 30 minutes prior to surgery. Postsurgery pain was recorded with the aid of a visual analogue scale (VAS) for 24 hours within the postsurgery period. In addition, a recording of total dose of ibuprofen rescue intake was done. For evaluating the percentage of people without rescue analgesics, Kaplan–Meier curves and log-rank analyses were utilized.

During the initial 12 hours, the VAS scores for the postsurgery pain in the etoricoxib group were considerably reduced when compared to the placebo group, as shown in Figure 1:

The number of people without analgesic rescue medication was considerably reduced in the etoricoxib group when compared to the placebo group. The average amount of rescue medication in the etoricoxib recipients was reduced when compared to placebo recipients (0.4 ± 0.9 dose vs. 1.1 ± 0.9 dose).

Etoricoxib led to the long-term survival of individuals without rescue analgesics. Thus, etoricoxib's low dose exhibits a preemptive pain-relieving effect, leading to the diminished use of analgesics in people scheduled to undergo surgical removal of an impacted horizontal mandibular third molar.