From a recent study, it was demonstrated that the intravenous (IV) acetaminophen before the third molar surgery provide adequate pain relief. It was revealed that the IV administration of acetaminophen before the third molar surgery offers efficient pain control than no treatment and postoperative administration.

This study was aimed to compare the efficacy of IV acetaminophen administered before or immediately after the surgical extraction of third molar.

In this study, 120 patients were considered. They were divided into three groups (pre-group, which was given 1000 mg of IV acetaminophen 20 min before surgery; post-group, which was given 1000 mg of IV acetaminophen after surgery; control-group, which did not administer any analgesic. 60 mg loxoprofen was used as rescue analgesia for each patient. The pain was measured at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 15 hours following the surgery using the visual analogue scale.

No considerable variation in pain level among the three groups was observed in the results, as shown in the following table:

However, the pre-group revealed the substantial low consumption of rescue analgesic and longer time until initial administration, as shown in the following table:

The administration of IV acetaminophen before the third molar surgery offers more successful pain control as compared to postoperative administration and no administration.