Lavender's Soothing Scent Could Be More Than Just Folk Medicine

An anonymous reader writes: In a study published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, [physiologist and neuroscientist Hideki Kashiwadani] and his colleagues found that sniffing linalool, an alcohol component of lavender odor, was kind of like popping a Valium (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). It worked on the same parts of a mouse's brain, but without all the dizzying side effects. And it didn't target parts of the brain directly from the bloodstream, as was thought. Relief from anxiety could be triggered just by inhaling through a healthy nose. Their findings add to a growing body of research demonstrating anxiety-reducing qualities of lavender odors and suggest a new mechanism for how they work in the body. Dr. Kashiwadani believes this new insight is a key step in developing lavender-derived compounds like linalool for clinical use in humans.

In this study, they exposed mice to linalool vapor, wafting from filter paper inside a specially made chamber to see if the odor triggered relaxation. Mice on linalool were more open to exploring, indicating they were less anxious than normal mice. And they didn't behave like they were drunk, as mice on benzodiazepines, a drug used to treat anxiety, or injected with linalool did. But the linalool didn't work when they blocked the mice's ability to smell, or when they gave the mice a drug that blocks certain receptors in the brain. This suggested that to work, linalool tickled odor-sensitive neurons in the nose that send signals to just the right spots in the brain -- the same ones triggered by Valium.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.