Efficacy of aromatherapy in relieving postoperative pain after cardiac surgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Aromatherapy. Pain. Thoracic Surgery. Cardiac surgery.
The presence of pain in the postoperative period of cardiac surgery can be decisive and
capable of influencing the quality of the patient's postoperative recovery, and can cause
harmful physiological responses and complications when not treated appropriately. For
effective pain control, it is essential to implement timely and efficient measures. The
use of complementary therapies such as non-pharmacological measures for pain relief
can be a viable solution to reduce the use of opioid analgesics. Aromatherapy with
essential oils presents itself as a safe and low-cost non-pharmacological therapy option,
with great potential for the treatment of several health conditions, such as pain, nausea,
vomiting, stress and anxiety. This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of
aromatherapy in pain relief in patients in the postoperative period of cardiac surgery.
This is a systematic review with meta-analysis. This type of study aims to summarize
the results obtained from primary studies and provide evidence on a specific topic,
based on the application of systematic search and analysis methods. The most recent
guidelines of the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions will be
followed, and to ensure greater methodological rigor in its structure and content, the
recommendations of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-
Analyses for Protocols 2020 (PRISMA) statement will be followed. For data
management purposes, a search and review protocol will be prepared and registered on
the International Prospective Register of Systematic Review (PROSPERO) platform.
Since this is a study based on secondary data, there will be no need for evaluation by a
research ethics committee. Controlled descriptors indexed in the Medical Subject
Headings (MeSH) will be selected to formulate the search strategy. The search and
selection of studies will occur in the following databases: National Library of Medicine
and National Institutes of Health (PubMed), Embase, Cumulative Index to Nursing and
Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Latin American and Caribbean Literature on
Health Sciences (LILACS), Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Central Register of
Controlled Trials (Library) and clinical trials databases (clinicaltrials.com). Data
collection will be performed by two reviewers independently, and the studies will be
selected according to the eligibility criteria adopted for the purposes of this review. A
specific instrument containing the variables of interest to the research will be used for
data extraction, from which the descriptive analyses will be processed. The data will be
entered into the Review Manager software (RevMan 5.2.3), where the Odds Ratio (OR)
and 95% Confidence Interval (CI) will be extracted and calculated for each selected
study. The risk of bias will be assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 (RoB 2) tool
and the strength of evidence using the Grading of Recommendation Assessment,
Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach.