Digestery
Lifestyle practices › Sauna and the Heart › Studies

Randomized trial · measured other health measures

8-week trial in 41 adults with heart artery disease found no clear sauna effect

Debray and colleagues · Journal of applied physiology · 2023

Original title: Finnish sauna bathing and vascular health of adults with coronary artery disease: a randomized controlled trial.

Under review. A person has not yet checked this summary against the paper. It is written from the PubMed abstract. Until a person checks it, search engines are asked not to list this page.

What the study found

No difference

Artery widening (FMD) did not differ: control 0.07% vs sauna 0.15% (interaction P = 0.909). Systolic (P = 0.951) and diastolic (P = 0.292) blood pressure did not differ between groups.

The study at a glance

Type of study
Randomized trial
Who or what was studied
41 people · adults aged about 62 with stable coronary artery disease
What was tested
Finnish sauna 4 times a week, 20-30 min each, at 79°C, for 8 weeks, vs keeping usual lifestyle
What it measured
Several kinds of outcomes
How long
8 weeks
Trial registration
10.6084/m9.figshare.23720949, 10.6084/m9.figshare.23720964
Who has a stake
No disclosure in PubMed
No disclosure in PubMed.
Journal
Journal of applied physiology, 2023
Source
PubMed record 37650138. This page is based on the abstract only.

How much this study counts

  • ✓Randomized: people were put into groups by chance, so the groups start out alike.
  • –Small: 41 people. Small trials can miss real effects or find chance ones.
  • –Short: 8 weeks. Longer-term effects are unknown.
  • •Measured several kinds of outcomes.
  • •The PubMed record has no conflict-of-interest statement.
  • •Summarized from the PubMed abstract only. The full paper may hold details the abstract leaves out.

✓ Strength– Limit• Note

These points come from fixed rules about the type of study, its size and length, what it measured, and who has a stake. Every study on Digestery gets the same rules.

Where this study sits

Each dot is one on-topic paper on this question. Steps near the top answer the question more directly.

↑ Stronger evidence

  1. Trials in people: heart disease, blood pressure and death

    3

    3 benefit

  2. Trials in people: other measures

    2

    1 benefit, 1 no difference

    ↑ This study is the ringed dot

  3. Trials in people: lab tests or safety

    5

    2 benefit, 1 mixed, 2 no difference

  4. Population studies

    4

    4 benefit

  5. Blood levels and genes

    0

    None among the papers we read.

↓ Weaker evidence

  • Points to benefit
  • Mixed
  • No difference
  • No direction
  • Points to harm

How it fits with the other research

The short answer to “Does sauna use lower heart disease risk?”

Possibly, but not proven in trials.

Confidence: low. Based on 21 on-topic papers.

Read the full answer

Few other papers sit on the same step, so there is little to compare it with.

  • Quoted in “What we found”: In a trial in forty-one adults with narrowed heart arteries, 8 weeks of Finnish sauna 4 times a week did not change blood pressure versus no sauna.
  • Part of the finding “Blood pressure: reviews and trials disagree”.
  • Marked as a key paper in the research timeline: Finnish sauna trial in heart patients: no vascular gains.

Other papers on the same step

See all 21 studies on this question

How this page was made

Label

First read of the abstract
Claude Sonnet
Independent second read
Claude Haiku
Differences settled
The reviewer corrected 1 field after reading the abstract. Claude Opus 5.5.
Headline
Claude Sonnet, from the checked study record. A script checked its numbers and wording.
Numbers
Checked against the abstract by a script
“How much this study counts”
Fixed rules, the same for every study
Source check by a person
Not yet. Required before search engines may list this page.

Spot an error? Email a flag with a link to your source, or use the form on the question page.