Deans' stroke musings: Essential Oils Enhance Cognition in Healthy Older Adults During Sleep

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, August 28, 2023

Essential Oils Enhance Cognition in Healthy Older Adults During Sleep

We are not healthy so this doesn't apply to us until our fucking failures of stroke associations complete this research on stroke survivors. Don't do this until then.

Essential Oils Enhance Cognition in Healthy Older Adults During Sleep

Nightly exposure to essential oils showed improvement in cognitive functioning among older adults.

Minimal overnight exposure to essential oils may be a cost-effective method to improve cognitive and neural functioning in healthy older adults, according to study findings published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Previous research has shown that olfactory enrichment alone, defined as the daily exposure of multiple odorants in individuals, could improve both memory and neurogenesis in mouse models. With cognitive loss becoming more common among older adults, researchers have acknowledged the need for an inexpensive low-effort method to improve cognition in this patient population. This prompted a group of researchers from at the University of California, Irvine to assess whether the use of olfactory enrichment at night could improve cognition in healthy older adults.

The researchers enrolled 132 older adults aged 60-85 who had normal cognition and good general health into a randomized controlled trial, Sensory Enrichment for Older Adults (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03914989), to assess the impact of olfactory enrichment on cognition. Each participant was randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups: olfactory enrichment with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), olfactory enrichment without MRI, control condition with MRI, and control condition without MRI. Research disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused some attrition, and 44 participants were ultimately excluded from analyses. The final count included: 20 participants in the olfactory-enriched with MRI group, 21 participants in the olfactory-enriched group without MRIs, 23 participants in the control group with MRI, and 24 participants in the control group without MRI scans.

Individuals in both olfactory-enriched groups were provided with an odorant diffuser and 7 different essential oil odorants. The diffuser released 1 scent for 2 hours per night, cycling through the scents each week. Individuals in the 2 control groups were given the same testing instructions, but the essential oil odorants were replaced with sham trace odorants. All groups used their odorant diffusers for 6 continuous months.

We have shown that minimal olfactory enrichment at night using an odorant diffuser results in significant improvements in both verbal memory and the integrity of a specific brain pathway.

Study participants underwent assessments for cognitive and olfactory functioning at baseline and after 6 months of odorant exposure. These assessments included the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) to confirm normal cognitive functioning as well as the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test to evaluate verbal learning and memory, and the completion of 3 subsets of the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition (WAIS-III). The researchers used the “Sniffin’ Sticks” test to assess olfactory system function as a way to determine whether olfactory enrichment enhanced olfactory performance.