Nursing students are more susceptible to sleep disturbances. The dormitory life also decreases the quality of their sleep. Due to the restriction of the use of drugs for the management of sleep disorders, the study was conducted to investigate the effect of aromatherapy with Citrus aurantium essence on the sleep quality among nursing students. In this randomized controlled trial, 100 nursing female students, who lived a dormitory life and met the inclusion criteria, were randomly allocated to the intervention and control group. The intervention group received aromatherapy with the essence of Citrus aurantium for 15 minutes overnight, for 14 nights, while the control group received no intervention. The sleep quality of all the students was measured by Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) after the intervention in both groups. The data were analyzed using the SPSS 11.5 software and inferential and descriptive statistics. The obtained results showed that the mean score of sleep quality of the intervention and control group before the intervention was 7.38 ± 2.12 and 7.19 ± 2.43, respectively, which yielded no statistically significant difference (p = 0.403); however, after the intervention in the intervention group (3.30 ± 0.97) compared with the control group (7.73 ± 2.64), there was a significant difference (p < 0.001). This means that the intervention group compared with the control group had better sleep quality. We expect aromatherapy with the essence of Citrus aurantium, which is a relatively simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive technique with low side effects, to be used by nursing students residing in dormitory to manage their sleep quality.
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