We’ve all heard the buzz around essential oils, they’re everywhere. Whether or not you believe they’re effective is irrelevant. This article will not make a case for either side. It will simply state recent findings by López et al,¹ which will allow you to make up your mind given peer-reviewed data.

Three takeaways to tell your friends:

Neurotransmitters (NTs) are essentially signaling drugs within our brains. They are how our neurons communicate. Neurons release certain NTs to communicate with receptors on other neurons.

For example, when glutamate, the most common excitatory NT in the brain, is released from a neuron, it will travel and could interact with a few receptors on other neurons. One specific receptor is the N-methyl D-aspartate Receptor (NMDAR). These receptors are one of the most studied of their kind because they’re directly involved in memory formation, but we’ll save that for another time. If enough glutamate is released and binds to NMDARs, the NMDARs will open and cause a positive signal to rush through to the end of that neuron, and the process repeats.

Anyways, what if I told you that the contents of lavender essential oils were capable of binding to some of these NT receptors? That could influence neuronal signaling, and depending on the receptor, it could have therapeutic effects.

If you know anyone who has been treated for depression then you’re probably familiar with this class of drugs: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). Serotonin is an NT that is thought to be low in depression, so scientists attempt to make more available to the receptors using SSRIs. Well, it turns out that the contents of lavender essential oils bind to the same targets as SSRIs, serotonin transporters. This interaction could have a similar therapeutic effect as SSRIs.

Lavender essential oils were shown to have similar binding to NMDARs as well which are targets for a famous antidepressant, ketamine. The authors postulate that the combined effect on serotonin transporters and NMDARs could have the anti-anxiety and antidepressant effects claimed by users using lavender essential oils.

Cells in a petri dish will die when exposed to a high concentration of hydrogen peroxide (H₂0₂). So, cells were supplied with lavender essential oils for 24 hours, either two hours before H₂0₂ or given at the same time as H₂0₂.¹ At high levels of cell death, cells supplied with lavender essential oil had significantly less death.¹

Lastly, they repeated their cell death study with one difference. Instead of H₂0₂, now the toxic agent was amyloid-beta_25-35 (Ab).¹ Ab is the peptide directly associated with Alzheimer’s disease. It forms the plaque structures that result in neuronal cell death and eventually memory loss. In the group that was supplied with lavender essential oils two hours before Ab, there was significantly less cell death in the lavender group than in the Ab group at the highest dose of Ab.¹ Therefore, lavender essential oils provide a neuroprotective quality. This cell survival could be due to the known nature of Ab inducing toxicity by over-releasing glutamate and lavender essential oils offsetting the toxicity by inhibiting the glutamate receptor, NMDA. Regardless, there is something to push forward on.

This paper has shown that the contents of lavender essential oils bind to important receptors involved in therapeutic drug targeting for anxiety and depression conditions. Don’t forget, that cells supplied with lavender oil survive toxic environments, including one with a toxic Alzheimer’s disease protein.

I mean, what more could you want from something your aunt has been trying to push on you for months?

1.         Lopez V, Nielsen B, Solas M, Ramirez MJ, Jager AK. Exploring Pharmacological Mechanisms of Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) Essential Oil on Central Nervous System Targets. Front Pharmacol. 2017;8:280.