Here ’s Another Reason Saunas Are So Good For You

For many gymgoers, a post-exercise sauna session is the reward for a workout well done. And a new study provides even more evidence that saunas are good for you. A paper published in the journal Neurology found that regular sauna baths were associated with a significant reduction in a person’s risk of having a stroke. “The findings are very strong,” said study co-author Setor Kunutsor, a research fellow at the University of Bristol in the UK, in an email to TIME. “Those who took a sauna four to seven times a week were about 60% less likely to have a stroke than people who took only one sauna per week.” The study looked at people living in Finland, where saunas are so common that many people have them in their homes. For about 15 years, researchers tracked 1,628 adults and asked them to fill out surveys about their sauna usage and other lifestyle habits. The participants also had a number of health tests performed at the start of the study. During the follow-up period, 155 people had strokes. The researchers used that data to calculate the rate of stroke per 1,000 people for three different groups: Those who used a sauna once per week, two to three times per week or four to seven times per week. They saw a marked disparity between the most frequent sauna bathers, who had 2.8 strokes per 1,000 people, and the least frequent, who had 8.1 strokes per 1,000 people. While overall stroke risk was still relatively low throughout the entire study group,...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime onetime Research Source Type: news