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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

> Research into the effects of saunas on people largely comes from Finland. It is generally of low quality and insufficient to make health recommendations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna#Health_effects

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TFA cites a number of RCTs that seem reasonably high quality to me:

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/circj/68/12/68_12_1146/...

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/circj/80/4/80_CJ-16-005...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41371-017-0008-z (this one isn't an RCT, it's just a pre/post design, but is still experimental)

Note: this list is not exhaustive, I just plucked a few out. I'd like to see slightly larger sample sizes in a few of them, but otherwise they seem structurally reasonable, and many are in Japan, not Finland.

These are all looking at various surrogate endpoints, and seem to be short term interventions. At best you could say they show saunas are safe for populations with heart disease. Cardiac and overall mortality would be the key endpoint to test in a large RCT. Even so, there won’t be a placebo. The control group would have to do something for it to be a fair comparison… perhaps something sauna-like but with less physiological impact (Massage? A cooler sauna?).

Looks like you can take this new study, and use it to expand that section (and remove the unsourced generalization about research being low quality)

(edit: did so myself)

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