Sauna may not be so good after all…
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It’s paywalled. Can you please paste the article here?
This is the abstract only, but here is the study this is based on: Long-term impacts of heatwaves on accelerated ageing | Nature Climate Change
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Pubmed is pretty mum about sauna and old age. Not many hits. There’s equivocal stuff like:
Sauna bathing, health, and quality of life among octogenarian men: the Helsinki Businessmen Study
Just an abstract, but seems prone to reverse causality.
Tons of articles hyping sauna in the pop press and SM health influencers though, which does not inspire much confidence.
This and cold plunges seem like a lot of mechanistic speculation around heat shock proteins, but not much in the way of longitudonal data.
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I did a brief summary using ChatGPT:
A recent study published in Nature Climate Change reveals that extreme heat from heat waves can accelerate biological aging in humans, with effects comparable to those from smoking or drinking alcohol.
Researchers analyzed medical data from over 24,922 people in Taiwan from 2008 to 2022, a period that included about 30 heat waves. They measured biological age—based on organ function tests like liver, kidney, and lung health—and found that exposure to these heat events added an average of 8 to 12 days to a person’s biological age over two years.The impact was stronger for those doing physical labor or living in rural areas, likely due to higher exposure without adequate cooling. Extreme heat stresses the body, raising risks for conditions like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia by altering blood pressure, cholesterol, and other functions. Interestingly, the aging effect diminished over the study’s 15 years, possibly thanks to wider adoption of air conditioning and other adaptations.Overall, the findings underscore the growing public health threat from climate-driven heat waves, with lead author Cui Guo noting that while the per-event impact seems small, it could accumulate significantly over time and across populations.
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How do we know it isn’t just the stronger sun causing this during heat waves? Do we know for sure it’s based on temperature?
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I think there are tons of confounding factors here, but in general, I don’t think its a good idea to be in persistent extreme heat. I wonder how much dehydration comes into play here… which can wreak havoc on your system. Also, some people, like myself are very intolerant to hot weather in general. I can spend 30 to 40 minutes in a sauna, but when I travel, I literally become sick when I am outside in a hot, humid environment… sometimes it only takes 10 minutes for me to experience this. I typically take an umbrella wherever I go now.
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I think we see examples all the time of acute stresses being good but chronic stresses being bad. Doing a sauna once a day is good stuff, most likely. But living in the equivalent of a sauna might be bad.
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I am so screwed……he says from Arizona.
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some of the world’s oldest people were from hot, humid equatorial countries. so seems like an existence proof of longevity in hot places.
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Re:saunas, chronic exposure is not the same as acute exposure. IMO the evidence for saunas being pro-healthspan and pro-longevity is much stronger than the evidence level of this study.
"However, multiple prospective Finnish cohort studies—mostly using traditional Finnish dry saunas (≈80–100 °C, low humidity)—report large, dose‑responsive associations between more frequent sauna use and lower risks of all‑cause and cardiovascular mortality, stroke, incident hypertension, respiratory disease, and dementia. These are observational, so residual confounding is possible.
Randomized trials of heat therapy (mostly hot‑water immersion or far‑infrared “Waon therapy,” plus a few small sauna experiments) improve proximal healthspan markers: blood pressure (~4/4 mmHg), endothelial function, and arterial stiffness; in heart failure, repeated far‑infrared sessions improve symptoms and 6‑minute walk distance. These trials do not include mortality or dementia endpoints. "
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Couldn’t agree more. Seems like a lot of people want to debunk the sauna benefits and dismiss it as a gimmick, probably because they don’t have easy access to a sauna themselves so they want it to not work. I see it on X all the time.
One of the ways I’ve seen others try to dismiss the benefits is by chalking it up to being a social activity. I don’t know about you guys but I use the sauna every day and most of them time, nobody ever talks to each other inside.
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