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Review
. 2022 Jun 1;10(6):1028.
doi: 10.3390/healthcare10061028.

Efficacy of Methylprednisolone Compared to Other Drugs for Pain, Swelling, and Trismus Control after Third Molar Surgery: A Meta-Analysis

Mariana González-Morelos  1 , Lorenzo Franco-de la Torre  2 , Diana Laura Franco-González  2 , Eduardo Gómez-Sánchez  3 , Ángel Josabad Alonso-Castro  4 , Nelly Molina-Frechero  5 , Luis Miguel Anaya-Esparza  6 , Mario Alberto Isiordia-Espinoza  2
Affiliations
Review

Efficacy of Methylprednisolone Compared to Other Drugs for Pain, Swelling, and Trismus Control after Third Molar Surgery: A Meta-Analysis

Mariana González-Morelos et al. Healthcare (Basel). .

Abstract

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to assess the efficacy of methylprednisolone compared to other drugs to control postoperative complications following third molar surgery. PubMed and Google Scholar were used for article searching. Thereafter, the trials meeting the selection criteria and with high methodological quality, according to the Cochrane Collaboration's risk of bias tool, were included in this study. The inverse variance test and mean difference using the Review Manager Software 5.3 for Windows were used to carry out data analysis. Qualitative analysis shows that methylprednisolone is more effective than NSAIDs, but inferior to dexamethasone, for controlling postoperative complications after third molar removal. The quantitative analysis showed no statistical difference for pain control, while trismus evaluation showed a statistical difference after 7 postoperative days in favor of methylprednisolone, when compared to other drugs. In conclusion, methylprednisolone was more effective for trismus control compared to other drugs after lower third molar surgery.

Keywords: methylprednisolone; non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; postoperative pain; third molar surgery; trismus.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Study flow diagram.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Bias evaluation of the full-text articles [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Meta-analysis of the pain intensity using the VAS [25,30].
Figure 4
Figure 4
Pooled analysis of the anti-trismus effect (p < 0.05) [29,30].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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