A recent study from Finland suggests that for men, spending time in a sauna seven days a week reduces risks of heart-related fatality compared to those who spend just one day a week in the sauna.
It would be interesting to find out how many men in America go to a sauna just once a year, or have ever been in a sauna. But this study, which took place in a sauna-centric part of the world and was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, indicates that there is a real correlation.
Starting in the 1980s, more than 2,000 middle-aged men in eastern Finland were followed by researchers for 20 years, and the risk for sudden cardiac death, fatal coronary heart disease and fatal cardiovascular disease was lower in men that frequented the sauna and stayed longer. Each of the men filled out questionnaires to record their sauna use.
Reuters explained what the study results indicated:
In 2011, the researchers used interviews, hospital documents, death certificates and autopsy reports to assess when and how participants had died.
Overall, 190 men had died of sudden cardiac death, 281 died of coronary heart disease, 407 from cardiovascular disease, and 929 had died from other causes.
Ten percent of the once-a-week sauna users suffered sudden cardiac death, compared to almost eight percent of those who used the sauna two or three times weekly and five percent of those who went four to seven times per week.
“There was an inverse relationship between sauna and (cardiovascular disease) risk, meaning that more is better,” senior author Dr. Jari Laukkanen, a cardiologist at the Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition of the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio told Reuters Health by email. “On the basis of these results, it seems that more than four sauna sessions per week had the lowest risk, but also those with two to three sauna sessions may get some benefits.”
Dr. Rita F. Redberg of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not part of the new study, told Reuters: “The act of sitting in a sauna is relaxing by definition as one can not be doing much else while in a sauna, and often they are enjoyed with others – friends or strangers. Physiologically, they may improve circulation.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Because this was an observational study, the association between heart health and sauna frequency isn’t entirely ironed out in terms of a causal relation, but if you have access to one, it appears that it couldn’t hurt.
[Photo from Flickr user Thomas Wanhoff]
