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28.09.2022

Orange oil aromatherapy may speed recovery from PTSD

People with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] may recover faster with orange oil aromatherapy. That's what researchers at George Washington University in the US hope after experimenting with mice. The researchers found that mice with an animal variant of PTSD return to normal function more quickly if they inhale orange oil.

Study
People who have experienced extreme anxiety, for example in a war or during a violent robbery, can develop PTSD. In a situation that is reminiscent of the original event, but not life-threatening, they experience extreme stress that makes normal functioning impossible.

Cassandra Moshfegh told the annual meeting of the American Physiological Society that she exposed mice to an experiment that scientists suspect mimics PTSD. Her research was funded by the US government.

The researcher gave her mice 2 stimuli at the same time - a neutral one [in this case a sound] and a negative one - for example an electric shock]. When the animals have learned to associate both stimuli with each other, when they are exposed to the neutral stimulus, they behave as if they were receiving a negative stimulus. In mice, this means that they 'freeze' - they no longer move. Mice 'freeze' when they are scared.

Orange oil
Moshfegh got some of her mice to inhale orange oil 40 minutes before and 40 minutes after learning a PTSD response, while others didn't. When the researcher exposed the mice again 48 hours later to the neutral stimulus, the freezing behavior in the orange oil group decreased by 17.1 percent. In the other group it was only 3.7 percent.

In another experiment, Moshfegh injected lipopolysaccharide into the intestines of her mice. Lipopolysaccharide causes inflammation. As a result, the amount of CD45+CD11b+ immune cells decreased by 68.7 percent in traumatized mice. If those mice also inhaled orange oil for 2 hours, the decrease was 54.2 percent.

Conclusion
"Relative to pharmaceuticals, essential oils are much more economical and do not have adverse side effects," Moshfegh said in a press release.

"The orange essential plant oil showed a significant effect on the behavioral response in our study mice. This is promising, because it shows that passively inhaling this essential oil could potentially assuage PTSD symptoms in humans."

Source:
Science Daily April 24, 2017

More:
Beta-Alanine offers protection against post-traumatic stress disorder 16.04.2015

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Cerebrogenics
Aromatherapy
Psychology

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