Flurbiprofen 8.75 mg lozenges for treating sore throat symptoms: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study

Summary points

Sore throat is a common complaint of patients with pharyngitis and is usually caused by a viral upper respiratory tract infection.

Even though sore throat is self-limiting, the discomfort that patients experience can have considerable impact on their wellbeing and daily activities, and patients commonly seek treatments from a healthcare professional.

This inappropriate use of antibiotics contributes to the increasing problem of antibiotic resistance; therefore, there is a need for alternative treatments to provide immediate pain relief.

This study investigated the lowest effective dose of the NSAID, flurbiprofen (8.75 mg) delivered within a soothing demulcent base formulation (lozenge).

Flurbiprofen 8.75 mg lozenges provided relief from three common patient-reported symptoms (sore throat pain, difficulty swallowing and swollen throat) over 24 h for up to 7 days, with minimal adverse events reported.

This study demonstrates that patients with local throat symptoms due to acute pharyngitis benefit from repeated treatment with flurbiprofen 8.75 mg lozenges.

These results provide healthcare professionals with an evidence-based treatment choice to tackle reported patient needs.

Sore throat is a common complaint of patients with pharyngitis and is usually caused by a viral upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) (1). Acute sore throat can be associated with a range of clinical features due to pharyngeal inflammation, including pharyngeal redness, enlarged tonsils and cervical lymph nodes, producing the sensation of a swollen throat and making it painful to swallow and difficult to swallow. While patients, in general, have all these pharyngeal symptoms (2), any one symptom can predominate for an individual patient (3). Even though sore throat is self-limiting, on average lasting 3-7 days (4), the discomfort that patients experience can have considerable impact on their wellbeing and daily activities (5). The symptoms are generally most bothersome in the first few days, which leads patients to seek advice and fast treatments from their healthcare provider (1,4). Treatment guidelines advocate symptomatic relief of sore throat, with antibiotics being reserved for those cases where bacterial infection is suggested or confirmed by culture, or when patients display severe red flag symptoms (4,6-9). Even in cases of confirmed bacterial sore throat, antibiotics do not provide immediate symptomatic relief and are effective in reducing sore throat by only 16 h over a 7-day course of treatment (4), with relief...