"Best Aromatherapy Herb for Alzheimer's"
Improving cognitive performance with aromatherapy
in young healthy volunteers is one thing, but how about where it really matters?
This group of Japanese researchers had this pie-in-the-sky notion
that maybe certain smells could lead to nerve “rebirth” in Alzheimer’s patients.
Twenty years ago, to even raise such a possibility
as a hypothetical was heretical!
Everybody knew that the loss of neurons is irreversible.
In other words, dead nerve cells are not replaced:
an important factor in neurodegenerative diseases.
That’s what I was taught; that’s what everyone was taught, until...
1998.
Patients with advanced cancer volunteered to be injected
with a special dye that’s incorporated into the DNA of new cells.
On autopsy, the researchers then went hunting for nerve cells
in the brain that lit up.
And, there they were, new nerve cells in the brain
that didn’t exist just days or months before,
demonstrating “that cell genesis occurs in human brains
and that the human brain retains the potential for self-renewal throughout life.”
Something we can take comfort in.
Still doesn’t mean smells can help,
but an aromatherapy regimen of rosemary, lemon, lavender, and orange
was attempted for a month.
Here’s the trajectory of their ability to form abstract ideas,
and their cognitive function starting 6 weeks before the treatment
showing a rather steady decline until they reversed after the aromatherapy.
The researchers concluded that aromatherapy may be efficacious
and have some potential for improving cognitive function,
all, of course, without any apparent side effects.
What about severe dementia?
We always hear about the cognitive deficits,
but more than half of patients with dementia
experience behavioral or psychiatric symptoms.
Thorazine-type antipsychotic drugs are often prescribed,
even though they appear to be particularly dangerous in the elderly,
but hey, it’s easier to just prescribe a drug
than offer nonpharmacological alternatives such as aromatherapy,
rubbing a lemon balm-infused lotion on their arms and face
twice daily compared to lotion without the scent.
Everybody got rubbed, but in the lemon balm group
significant improvements in agitation, shouting, screaming,
and physical aggression, and improved quality of life indicators -
less socially withdrawn, more engagement in constructive activities.
That’s important, because when you give the antipsychotics,
patients become more withdrawn, less engaged;
it’s like a chemical restraint.
Yeah, the drugs can reduce agitation too,
but that may just be because you’re effectively knocking the person out.
So, aromatherapy with lemon balm “is safe, well tolerated, …
highly efficacious, with additional benefits on key quality of life parameters.
These findings clearly indicate the need for longer-term multicenter trials,”
but we never had any, until…
never.
We still don’t have any.
This study was back in 2002 and still nothing,
but is that a surprise?
Who’s going to fund such a study:
Big Balm?