Can Regular Sauna Use Lower Your Risk of Stroke? A 15-Year Finnish Study

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and long-term disability worldwide, so a large study linking a common lifestyle habit to lower stroke risk is worth a close look — especially when it's published in one of neurology's most respected journals.

What the research looked at

Published in Neurology in 2018, this prospective cohort study — again drawn from the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study — followed 1,628 Finnish men and women aged 53 to 74, none of whom had a history of stroke at the start. Participants reported their sauna habits at baseline and were grouped by weekly frequency: once, two to three times, or four to seven times. Researchers then tracked incident stroke events over a median follow-up of nearly 15 years.

What they found

Over the follow-up period, 155 participants had a stroke. Compared with once-a-week sauna users, those who used the sauna four to seven times a week had a 61% lower risk of stroke, even after accounting for age, sex, and other cardiovascular risk factors. The two-to-three-times-a-week group showed a smaller, borderline reduction.

What this means in practice

As with other sauna-and-mortality research from this cohort, this is an observational study — it can show a strong association but can't prove sauna use itself lowers stroke risk, since people who sauna more often may also be healthier or more active in other ways the study couldn't fully account for. It's also specific to a Finnish population using traditional dry sauna. That said, it adds to a consistent, dose-dependent pattern across multiple independent outcomes — heart disease, stroke, and all-cause mortality — from the same well-characterized cohort, which strengthens the overall case even without a randomized trial.