[Flurbiprofen in oral surgery]

Odontic surgery necessitates the very frequent use of additional auxiliary therapy to improve the post-operative symptoms. In fact the injured tissues respond to such surgical operations generally with an infiltrative-type process which is manifested predominantly by pain, pyrexia, oedema and in the more serious cases with total functional incapacity. The therapy for such symptomatology usually consists of NSAID, steroidal anti-inflammatories and/or chemotherapy. The scope of this research was to verify the possibility of utilising, exclusively, a potent non steroidal antiinflammatory whilst evaluating its therapeutic effects on the pain, the pyrexia and the oedema sustained following odontic surgery. The drug under examination was flurbiprofen, a medication with powerful antiinflammatory, analgesic and antipyretic properties whose mode of action, typical of this type of drug, is principally explained by its inhibition of prostaglandins biosynthesis. Moreover, flurbiprofen has been shown to be a potent inhibitor of platelet aggregation and of the migration of leucocytes. It has other pharmacological mechanisms of action but so far these remain insufficiently well explained. For the above mentioned study, 50 patients who had consented to take part were to undergo odontic surgery near to our clinic. They were subdivided into two groups, each consisting of 25 subjects, and each group was assigned an exclusive therapeutic regimen based on flurbiprofen. Patients in the first group were administered a flurbiprofen dose of 300 mg/day, by mouth, commencing on the day preceding the surgery and then on the next 7 consecutive days.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)