Effects of Lavender Essential Oil on Sleep Quality, Anxiety, and Fatigue in Patients With Chronic Heart Failure

Heart failure (HF)， a severe manifestation or advanced stage of various cardiac diseases, may seriously affect patients' quality of life because repeated hospitalizations lead to changes in work and living environment, changes in roles, economic burdens, sexual dysfunction, limitations of social life, and worries about maintaining life. Patients are often accompanied by mental problems such as anxiety, depression, fatigue, and sleep disorders, so their quality of life is low.

Currently, the treatment of CHF is mainly to improve physical symptoms and control complications. However, insufficient attention is drawn to mental and psychological problems such as anxiety, sleep disorders, and fatigue associated with CHF patients.

Patients with anxiety and sleep disturbances are generally treated with antipsychotic and sedative-hypnotic drugs. Although effective, this method also creates dependencies and tolerability with the long-term application. So in recent years, complementary and alternative medicine is a novel adjunctive therapy, including aromatherapy, and traditional medicine, which can improve the patient's health and maintain a calm inner peace.

The commonly used lavender essential oil (Lavandula angustifolia) is the least toxic and allergenic of all aromatic oils. The main components of lavender are linalool and linalool acetate, which act as sedative, anti-nociceptive, and antispasmodic by reducing sympathetic nerve activity and stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system activity. Aromatherapy using lavender essential oil has been widely used in patients with cancer, postpartum depression, pregnant women, blood purification, acute coronary syndrome, myocardial infarction, and quasi-coronary angiography. Studies have shown that aromatherapy using lavender essential oil can relieve anxiety and depression, reduce fatigue, and improve sleep quality, and it has not been found to cause associated adverse events and complications. It showed good safety, while the use of lavender essential oil in patients with CHF has been less studied.

This study intends to use aromatherapy for CHF patients to observe the effects of lavender essential oil inhalation on sleep quality, anxiety, and fatigue in CHF patients, in order to provide a new care method for CHF patients with all-round mental and physical self-management and improve the long-term quality of life of CHF patients.