Results just out from Cancer Research UK show that aromatherapy can help people who’ve had cancer treatment. The latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, highlights facts from the study.

It seems that after cancer treatment including chemotherapy, aromatherapy helps significantly with anxiety and depression, and does so much faster than other approaches.

It’s the first large randomised controlled trial to be conducted on a complementary therapy in several centres in the NHS. It’s the highest standard of research, done at the level that doctors take most seriously.

The study examined 288 people with all types of cancer and at various stages of the disease who had had anxiety or depression diagnosed after treatment. Many had severe symptoms such as panic attacks, inability to sleep and needle phobia.

Nearly half of cancer sufferers get problems like these within the first year. Half of the subjects in the trial received a course of weekly aromatherapy massage and half received normal support services, such as counselling and, in severe cases, psychotherapy and medication. Their symptoms were monitored for 12 weeks.

The results were so clear that they surprised the experts. “I think it’s enormously exciting,” says the lead researcher, Amanda Ramirez, professor of psychiatry and the director of the Cancer Research UK London Psychosocial Group at King’s College London.

“I’m unaware of other treatments, including talking therapies, that can achieve such fast improvements in people with cancer who are anxious or depressed.”

Results showed that symptoms lifted after two weeks in the aromatherapy group - far earlier than in the nonaromatherapy group which took six weeks. What’s also interesting is that although after ten weeks the two groups showed equal alleviation of symptoms, members of the group receiving aromatherapy consistently reported more improvement in anxiety than the other group right though the trial.

However, aromatherapy seemed to bring no significant improvement to other symptoms such as pain, fatigue, nausea and vomiting.

The trial didn’t isolate the different elements of the therapy - scents, touch, and time with the therapist - or attempt to say which elements had a more beneficial effect. Several different practitioners were involved so that the therapy, not the therapist was evaluated. More than 20 oils, including bergamot and lavender, were used in the trial.

“The results show that aromatherapy really accelerates the improvement in anxiety and depression,” says Ramirez. “And when you consider that many people in the trial had a limited life expectancy, that acceleration is a huge gain to health and wellbeing.”

Around one in three cancer patients tries complementary therapies. Aromatherapy and massage are popular and people claimed they were beneficial. This is what prompted Ramirez and cancer specialists from Mount Vernon Hospital, Middlesex, to get the trial rolling in 1998.

They knew that the UK’s health service management is generally unwilling to pay for treatments such as aromatherapy because of the lack of evidence proving its benefits.

But the results of the new trial, also supported by Marie Curie Cancer Care, Macmillan Cancer Support and Dimbleby Cancer Care, may help to put aromatherapy on a similar footing to treatments such as physiotherapy, which are already available on the NHS.

A smaller trial had already found that aromatherapy significantly reducted agitation in people with dementia. In 2004, the Cochrane Collaboration recommended further studies on massage and aromatherapy. Although there were reports of improved wellbeing in cancer patients, evidence was mixed and larger trials were needed. This new study helps to fill that gap.

Andy Ritchie, chairman of the National Cancer Research Institute Group on Complementary Therapy, said the findings were impressive and reliable. “They demonstrate that professional research can be conducted in complementary therapies.”

For Amanda Ramirez, 48, there was an added significance to the trial. Shortly after it began, she was told she had breast cancer. Aware of the benefits that many patients had claimed for aromatherapy, she decided to try while she was having chemotherapy.

“In the face of those strong drugs, it felt relaxing, like a balm. But it also felt powerful, almost like an antidote to the poisons in my body.” Ramirez has now been clear of cancer for five years, has many reasons to be happy - and was able to finish her research project.