Sauna

The widely quoted reductions in cardiovascular and all-cause mortality come largely from a single long-running Finnish cohort. It is observational, so people who use a sauna several times a week may simply differ from those who do not in ways the analysis cannot fully remove. Small controlled trials do show genuine short-term effects on blood pressure and vascular function.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2010 whose title contains “sauna” or “sauna bathing” or “passive heating”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.