Opioids are a popular choice for pain relief after surgery, but they come with a downside: addiction.
This has become a public health crisis, with drug overdose deaths involving opioids multiplying by more than six times since 1999 in the US.
In the last two decades, nearly 600,000 people in the US and Canada have died from opioid overdoses, a situation worsened by the pandemic with over 100,000 drug overdose deaths reported in 2021 alone.
Without serious intervention, North America could see an additional 1.2 million opioid deaths by 2029.
A Potential Solution: Aromatherapy
Aromatherapy, a practice thousands of years old, might offer a solution. Recent studies show that lavender and peppermint aromatherapy could help reduce anxiety, a major factor that increases post-operative pain and opioid use.
To test this theory, Professor Jacques Chelly and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh conducted one of the first randomized, placebo-controlled trials on the topic.
Part 3: The Study Design and Participants
Starting in January 2020, the team screened more than 350 hip replacement patients for anxiety using a survey.
Those with moderate anxiety were invited to participate in the ongoing study, which aims to enroll 60 patients. Participants were randomly assigned to the aromatherapy group or the placebo group.
The aromatherapy group wore a lavender and peppermint “aromatab,” a patch that slowly releases essential oils, from an hour before their surgery until 72 hours after.
The placebo group wore a patch that emitted sweet almond oil, which doesn’t have anxiety-reducing properties.
Preliminary Results
Preliminary results for the first 25 participants show promising outcomes. Though both groups’ anxiety scores decreased after surgery, the aromatherapy group’s fell more.
Notably, total opioid use was 50% lower in the aromatherapy group in the first 48 hours after surgery. The team has yet to analyze data on pain, depression, and catastrophizing levels.
Conclusions and Next Steps
The researchers concluded that aromatherapy might help control post-surgical pain and reduce opioid consumption by easing anxiety.
They believe this could have significant implications for the opioid crisis in the US.
They suggest that aromatherapy, by acting on the limbic system – a brain structure that regulates pain, emotion, and anxiety – might offer a simple, cost-effective technique to minimize the impact of anxiety on post-operative pain and opioid use.
Next, the team plans to study the effect of aromatherapy on the brain using MRI.
If you care about pain, please read studies about why long COVID can cause pain, and common native American plant may help reduce diarrhea and pain.
For more information about pain, please see recent studies about why people with red hair respond differently to pain than others, and results showing this drug may relieve painful ‘long covid’ symptoms.
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