Olive and Eucalyptus Oils Help Wounds Heal

A syn­ergy between olive oil and euca­lyp­tus oil enhances the heal­ing process of wounds and burns, accord­ing to a recent study by researchers at the University of Pavia, Italy. The study tried sev­eral dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of lipid and essen­tial oils to treat burns on rats. Olive oil came out a clear win­ner.

“Chronic wounds and severe burns are dis­eases respon­si­ble for severe mor­bid­ity and even death,” researchers explained in the study. ​“Wound repair is a cru­cial process and tis­sue regen­er­a­tion enhance­ment and infec­tion pre­ven­tion are key fac­tors to min­i­mize pain, dis­com­fort, and scar for­ma­tion.”
See Also:Olive Oil Health Benefits

Published in the December 2017 vol­ume of the International Journal of Nanomedicine, the study tested both solid and liq­uid fats — cocoa but­ter, olive oil, and sesame oil — as car­ri­ers for rose­mary and euca­lyp­tus essen­tial oils.

Essential oils are parts of plants extracted from their seeds, leaves, roots, flow­ers or fruits. They are com­monly used as per­fume, for aro­mather­apy or in bak­ing, but also have med­i­c­i­nal uses. Essential oils are volatile com­pounds that eas­ily degrade when exposed to light, heat and air. The addi­tion of a fat such as olive oil helped sta­bi­lize the essen­tial oils.

In the Italian study, researchers treated rats for 18 days, then biop­sied their wounds. Olive oil showed sig­nif­i­cantly higher bioad­he­sion prop­er­ties than sesame oil, mean­ing it was able to stick to the bio­log­i­cal tis­sue and suc­cess­fully deliver the essen­tial oil. Researchers con­cluded that olive oil’s much higher per­cent­age of unsat­u­rated fatty acids, espe­cially monoun­sat­u­rated oleic and palmi­toleic acids, accounted for its advan­tage over sesame oil.

Eucalyptus oil has a long his­tory of med­i­c­i­nal use, from clean­ing catheters in 19^th cen­tury English hos­pi­tals to a pop­u­lar ingre­di­ent in herbal cough drops. Its antimi­cro­bial and anti­sep­tic qual­i­ties pro­mote heal­ing and pre­vent against infec­tion. In 2016, Serbian researchers con­cluded that the antimi­cro­bial prop­er­ties of euca­lyp­tus could work on antibi­otic-resis­tant bac­te­ria, and per­haps decrease people’s depen­dence on antibi­otics. Rosemary, a native of the Mediterranean, is used med­i­c­i­nally as an anti-inflam­ma­tory, to pro­mote nerve growth and improve cir­cu­la­tion.

The lead researcher on the study, Sandri Giuseppina, is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in the Department of Drug Sciences at the University of Pavia. She researches in the fields of bio­phar­ma­ceu­tics and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal tech­nol­ogy and is espe­cially inter­ested in ways to deliver drugs other than orally. She has pub­lished sev­eral stud­ies on meth­ods for heal­ing wounds.

• International Journal of Nanomedicine


• Journal of Ethnopharmacology