Celebrex (celecoxib), a pain-relieving nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), is marginally safer than older NSAIDs, a new study suggested.

Over the past many years, doctors suspected that Celebrex would increase risk of heart attack or stroke risks in arthritis patients. But, a three-way comparison of prescription doses of Celebrex, Motrin (ibuprofen) and Naprosyn (naproxen) showed negligible difference in patients' risk of heart attack or stroke, with Celebrex doing slightly better than the other two drugs.

In the study, which started ten years ago and involved as many as 1,000 medical centers around the globe, the researchers equally divided nearly 24,000 osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis patients into three groups, with each group assigned prescription doses of the three drugs.

All the patients had been diagnosed either with heart disease or had a higher risk for developing a cardiovascular problem alongside their arthritis condition.

Celebrex didn't prove more risky than its rival drugs. In the celecoxib group, heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular-related deaths occurred in 2.3 per cent of the patients. Among those who took naproxen and ibuprofen, cardiovascular-related deaths occurred in 2.5 per cent and 2.7 per cent of the patients, respectively.

The researchers reported the new study in the November 13th edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.