Adding Life to Your Years

Wellness Research — The Cornerstone

Wellness Technology as Adjunct Therapy for Chronic Illness, Cancer Recovery,
and Healthy Aging.

~15 min readLast reviewed: July 15, 2026By Bree Garrett, Founder

There is an old idea — usually quoted, rarely lived — that you cannot add more years to your life, but you can add life to your years. For most of modern medicine, that distinction was treated as a poetic flourish. It is no longer. Healthspan — how well and how fully you live across the decades you have — has become its own field of research, its own industry, and its own measure of what good care looks like.

This article exists because the most common question we hear from clients, clinicians, and B2B buyers is some version of the same one: What does the science actually say about wellness technology — hyperbaric oxygen, red light therapy, cryotherapy, infrared sauna — in chronic illness, cancer recovery, and the long arc of aging well? Not the marketing claims. The peer-reviewed evidence.

The honest answer is that the evidence is real, growing, increasingly cited in mainstream oncology and cardiology literature, and far more nuanced than the breathless content that dominates social media on either side. The four modalities below are not cures. They are not replacements for medical care. What they are — used carefully, integrated into a broader plan, and matched to the appropriate context — is a group of increasingly researched adjunctive technologies with evidence that ranges from established for specific indications to promising but preliminary.

This is a Wellness Concierge guide. We have read the studies, indexed the citations, and pulled out what we believe matters most for you to understand. If you came here from our article on The Wellness Investor, this is the clinical companion piece — the evidence layer underneath the philosophy.

Why "Healthspan" Is the Number That Actually Matters

For most of the twentieth century, the measure of medical success was lifespan — the gap between birth and death. That number has increased dramatically since 1900 — US life expectancy has climbed from roughly 47 years to nearly 79. The number that has not kept pace is healthspan — the years you live in functional, mobile, cognitively intact health.

A growing body of public-health research now distinguishes between the two. The UN's World Health Organization tracks Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) alongside conventional life expectancy precisely because the gap between them is so meaningful. In a 2024 analysis of 183 World Health Organization member states, the United States had the largest measured healthspan-lifespan gap — approximately 12.4 years.¹ The researchers defined that gap as the difference between life expectancy and health-adjusted life expectancy: years lived with some degree of disease or disability.

That gap is the context for everything that follows. No single intervention — and certainly no wellness device — has been shown to close it on its own. The more useful question is whether carefully selected adjuncts can improve specific contributors to healthspan: inflammation, cardiovascular function, mobility, recovery, symptom burden, and quality of life.

That is what we mean when we say "life to your years."

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: Established Radiation-Injury Use and an Expanding Oncology Adjunct Research Base

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is the medical use of 100% oxygen at pressures higher than sea-level atmospheric pressure, delivered inside a pressurized chamber. FDA-cleared HBOT devices are used for a defined group of recognized clinical indications — including decompression sickness, carbon-monoxide poisoning, selected difficult wounds, delayed radiation injury, and certain serious infections — and have been used in these settings for decades. What has changed in the last five years is the breadth of active investigation into HBOT as an oncology adjunct.

Where the evidence is most established: chronic radiation side effects in cancer survivors. A 2026 review in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians — one of the most-cited journals in clinical oncology — surveyed the current evidence for HBOT in treating late-effect radiation injury: soft tissue fibrosis, osteoradionecrosis (radiation-induced bone necrosis), and radiation cystitis.² These are not theoretical complications. They are recognized and sometimes debilitating late consequences of curative radiation therapy that can persist for years after a cancer is considered "treated." For these survivors, HBOT has become a meaningful clinical option, with the mechanism reasonably well understood and outcomes documented in the referenced review.

Where the evidence is actively growing: HBOT alongside chemotherapy and radiation in solid tumors. Multiple Phase II clinical trials are currently investigating HBOT in combination with cancer therapy in solid tumors — including breast cancer (studied in a neoadjuvant setting) and gastric cancer (studied as an adjunct alongside standard-of-care treatment).³ Primary endpoint readouts from these trials will mature as the studies complete. The biological rationale is concrete: many solid tumors contain regions of hypoxia (low oxygen), and hypoxic tumor tissue is documented to be more resistant to both radiation and certain chemotherapeutic agents. HBOT temporarily increases tissue oxygen tension, with the working hypothesis that this re-oxygenation may make tumors more responsive to the standard-of-care treatments they were already going to receive. This is an active hypothesis, not an established clinical protocol.

Where the evidence is most preliminary: immunotherapy potentiation. A translational literature suggests that hypoxia in the tumor microenvironment may also suppress immune-cell function — potentially limiting how well checkpoint-inhibitor immunotherapies can do their job. Early data suggests HBOT may reduce that immunosuppression, opening a possible path to combination protocols. This is cutting-edge oncology research, not standard care; results will continue to mature over the coming years.

What HBOT is not. It is not, and is not being studied as, a stand-alone cancer treatment. The protocols above are all adjuncts — used with surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or immunotherapy, never instead of. HBOT also requires medical supervision. Portable home and wellness-market "mild hyperbaric" chambers typically operate at lower pressures — often around 1.3 ATA — than the hard-shell medical chambers used in hospital indications and oncology research, which commonly operate around 2.0–2.5 ATA. The mild-hyperbaric category has its own separate — and considerably smaller, more preliminary — research literature, most commonly explored in contexts like concussion recovery, post-stroke rehabilitation, and chronic fatigue conditions. It is important to understand this evidence base as distinct from the higher-pressure medical research above, and as still emerging rather than established.

Read more: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Explained

Photobiomodulation (Red Light Therapy): Device-Specific FDA Clearance and an Expanding Supportive-Care Evidence Base

Photobiomodulation (PBM) — the umbrella term that includes red light therapy and low-level laser therapy — uses specific wavelengths of light to drive cellular processes. The mechanism is well characterized in the preclinical and translational literature: light in the red and near-infrared spectrum is absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondria, which increases ATP production, reduces oxidative stress, and modulates inflammatory signaling.

Device-specific FDA clearance for post-mastectomy lymphedema (2004). The FDA granted 510(k) clearance to a specific 904-nm gallium-arsenide low-level laser therapy device, the LTU-904, in 2004 for use as part of a therapy regimen for post-mastectomy lymphedema.⁴ This is important to state precisely: the clearance is device-specific, indication-specific, and does not extend to generic red light panels, other PBM devices, or other PBM indications. It does not constitute categorical FDA approval of red light therapy. It does, however, establish a regulatory foothold that has informed clinical practice in cancer rehabilitation for nearly two decades. Lymphedema is a chronic, often disfiguring swelling of the arm that affects a substantial fraction of breast cancer survivors and historically has had few good options.

Supportive-care evidence in oncology has grown meaningfully, but its strength varies by indication. PBM has guideline-supported applications for preventing oral mucositis in certain cancer-treatment settings. Smaller trials and reviews have also reported promising findings for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy and radiation-induced dermatitis, although the evidence remains limited or low-certainty and protocols vary considerably. A separate wound-care literature has investigated PBM for chronic wounds and ulcers outside — and sometimes within — cancer recovery. These findings should be evaluated indication by indication rather than treated as categorical evidence for red light therapy generally.⁵

Oncologic safety. Available human studies at therapeutic doses have not identified an increased tumor-growth or recurrence signal — an important finding for survivors considering the modality. That said, the human safety evidence base for PBM in oncology populations remains limited relative to what would be required for a categorical safety endorsement, and PBM use during or after cancer treatment should be coordinated with the oncology care team.

Active clinical investigation: head and neck cancer chronic lymphedema. Clinical investigation has also evaluated PBM for chronic lymphedema following head-and-neck cancer treatment—a condition with relatively few established treatment options.

Why Wavelength Alone Is Not Enough. PBM research commonly uses red wavelengths around 630–660 nm and near-infrared wavelengths around 800–850 nm. Red light is generally absorbed more superficially, while near-infrared light can penetrate more deeply into tissue. But wavelength alone does not determine clinical performance. Irradiance, total energy dose, exposure time, treatment distance, delivery method, tissue composition, and the target condition all affect the response. No single wavelength is universally "best," and a device should be evaluated against the complete research protocol used for its intended application.

Read more: Red Light Therapy Explained · What Is Photobiomodulation?

Whole-Body Cryotherapy: Promising Evidence for Inflammatory Modulation

Extreme-cold air therapy — delivered in specialized chambers or cryosaunas — has accumulated a research base focused primarily on its effects on systemic inflammation and pain in chronic-disease populations. A terminology note is important up front: the academic literature distinguishes whole-body cryotherapy (WBC) — an enclosed chamber in which the head is also cooled — from partial-body cryotherapy (PBC), also called partial-body cryostimulation — a cryosauna in which the user's head remains outside the cold-air envelope. The cryosaunas most common in commercial wellness and rehabilitation settings, including the systems InfraCore Wellness curates, are the head-out (PBC) category. Some of the pooled evidence discussed below draws from both categories; where a distinction has been made in the source literature, we note it.

The 2025 meta-analysis on cryotherapy and systemic inflammation. In 2025, Scientific Reports — a peer-reviewed Nature Portfolio journal — published a meta-analysis of eleven randomized controlled trials investigating cold-air cryotherapy's effect on systemic inflammation. The pooled analysis is small (11 trials, 274 participants; individual trial samples of 5–32) and displays high heterogeneity — the authors themselves flag substantial uncertainty. Measurable pooled changes were documented in selected inflammatory markers: IL-1β decreased and IL-10 increased. IL-6, TNF-α, and CRP did not reach statistical significance across the trials reviewed.⁶

Inflammatory cytokines documented in this and related cryotherapy research overlap with pathways implicated in rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and other autoimmune conditions. This overlap of mechanism is part of why the modality has attracted research attention as a possible adjunct — not as a substitute for disease-modifying pharmacology — across:

• Rheumatoid arthritis — A 56-patient randomized controlled trial reported short-term improvements after a course of six sessions; longer-term differences were limited, and the researchers themselves described the overall clinical evidence for cryotherapy in rheumatoid arthritis as scarce, with no established optimal dose or frequency.
• Type 2 diabetes and obesity — Small studies have documented modest changes in insulin sensitivity and lipid markers with regular cryotherapy; effect sizes and durability remain preliminary.
• Mild cognitive impairment — Pilot work suggests cognitive benefit, hypothesized to reflect systemic-inflammation reduction (chronic neuroinflammation is considered a contributor to age-related cognitive decline).
• Traumatic brain injury rehabilitation — Emerging evidence base, predominantly in athletic populations.
• Mental health and cognition — Small preliminary studies have reported changes in memory and attention measures following protocol courses.

A note on protocols. Published cryotherapy research uses differing chamber configurations, temperatures, session frequencies, and populations. Chamber configuration is not always reported or categorized consistently, so findings should not be assigned to a head-in chamber or a head-out cryosauna unless the configuration used in the underlying study has been verified. Most protocols involve brief, repeated sessions delivered as a clustered course rather than sporadic exposure. Cryotherapy facials, localized probes, and cold-water immersion belong to separate research literatures.

What cryotherapy is not. It is not a treatment for autoimmune disease. It is not a substitute for disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs or biologics. It is a research-supported adjunct — used in rehabilitation, sports medicine, and chronic-pain management programs across Europe and a growing number of US facilities — with the evidence base still maturing and still varying meaningfully by indication, by protocol, and by chamber configuration.

Read more: Cold Plunge vs. Cryotherapy · Beyond Pain Management: Research on Recovery Modalities

Sauna: Cardiovascular and Cognitive Associations—and What We Know About Infrared

Of every modality discussed in this article, regular sauna use has the most striking association with long-term, all-cause mortality outcomes — and the longest-running prospective human data behind it.

The KIHD study: 20 years, 2,300 men, and the dose-response curve that changed the conversation. The Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD) is a Finnish prospective cohort study that has been following middle-aged Finnish men for more than two decades. In 2015, Laukkanen and colleagues published in JAMA Internal Medicine a finding that was widely covered in mainstream press and is now routinely cited in cardiovascular literature: compared to men using a sauna once per week, men using a sauna 4–7 times per week had:

• Approximately 63% lower risk of sudden cardiac death (HR 0.37)⁷
• Approximately 48% lower risk of fatal coronary heart disease
• Approximately 40% lower all-cause mortality

A 2017 follow-up in Age and Ageing, from the same cohort, documented an equally striking finding for cognitive outcomes: men using a sauna 4–7 times per week had approximately 66% lower risk of dementia and a similar reduction in Alzheimer's diagnosis compared to once-weekly users.⁸

These are observational, not randomized, findings — which is the appropriate caveat — but the dose-response curve (more frequent use, stronger effect), the magnitude of the effect, and the duration of follow-up have together made KIHD one of the most-cited longevity datasets in modern public health research.

The mechanism, in plain terms. A sauna session at 80–100°C raises core body temperature, induces heavy sweating, drives cardiac output to roughly the level of moderate aerobic exercise, and triggers vasodilation, heat-shock-protein expression, and endothelial-function adaptations. Acute sauna exposure raises heart rate and cardiac output, while repeated heat exposure has been associated with improvements in blood pressure, arterial stiffness, and endothelial function. The size and durability of those effects vary across populations and protocols.

A 2025 development that matters for chronic-illness populations. A 2025 paper in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine — focused specifically on sauna use in cardiovascular health and peripheral arterial disease — proposed heat therapy as a potential adjunctive management strategy alongside or in place of exercise for patients who cannot regularly exercise. The authors specifically discussed sedentary populations with disabilities, wheelchair users, patients on non-weightbearing status, the elderly, and those with peripheral arterial disease who face barriers to traditional exercise regimens.⁹ The language throughout is appropriately measured — heat therapy "might be beneficial" rather than "is recommended" — but the paper's framing of sauna as a candidate cardiovascular adjunct for the exercise-intolerant is a meaningful step in mainstream cardiology literature, and points to the population for whom the lifespan-versus-healthspan gap is widest.

Infrared versus traditional. The KIHD evidence is overwhelmingly from traditional Finnish saunas. Infrared saunas heat the body through radiant energy rather than convective hot air and typically operate at lower air temperatures. The infrared evidence base is smaller and more heterogeneous, with preliminary findings involving cardiovascular markers, fibromyalgia, and other outcomes. Those findings should not be treated as equivalent to the KIHD mortality and dementia associations.

A note on detox claims. Sauna marketing frequently overstates "detoxification" benefits. Sauna's cardiovascular associations are notable, while its cognitive and metabolic evidence remains more limited and should not be confused with proof of causation. The "sweating out toxins" framing is mechanistically weak and not where the published evidence lives — we don't lean on it, and we recommend any concierge consultation that you've had with us does not lean on it either.

The Stacking Effect: Why These Modalities Are Increasingly Used Together

Read enough of the supportive-care, rehabilitation, and integrative-oncology literature and a pattern emerges that single-modality reviews tend to obscure: these four interventions act on largely complementary pathways.

• HBOT increases tissue oxygenation and modulates inflammation and angiogenesis primarily through oxygen-pressure mechanisms.
• PBM drives mitochondrial ATP production, reduces local oxidative stress, and supports tissue-level repair through photochemistry.
• Cold-air cryotherapy may modulate selected inflammatory markers through cold-stress, autonomic, and vascular responses.
• Sauna drives heat-stress vascular adaptation, heat-shock-protein expression, and parasympathetic recovery.

In rehabilitation medicine, integrative-oncology supportive care, and high-performance recovery settings, these are increasingly deployed not in isolation but as stacked protocols — for example, post-operative HBOT plus PBM for wound healing; cryotherapy plus infrared sauna in contrast-therapy formats for inflammatory disease management; PBM plus HBOT for radiation-injury recovery in cancer survivors. The evidence base for each individual modality is more developed than the evidence base for these combinations. Multi-modality use in cancer survivorship programs, athletic recovery centers, and longevity-medicine clinics reflects clinical practice ahead of head-to-head trial data, not established consensus on combined efficacy.

The Wellness Concierge philosophy at InfraCore is built around this reality. The right protocol for someone recovering from radiation therapy is different from the right protocol for a patient managing rheumatoid arthritis, and both are different from the right protocol for a 55-year-old executive trying to compress the gap between lifespan and healthspan. The modalities are different; the selection, timing, and sequence should change with the person, the purpose, and the medical context.

The Healthspan Math: Why This Conversation Is Different at Different Ages

In our companion article on The Wellness Investor, we argued that the same long-term thinking financial advisors have spent decades telling Americans to apply to money should be applied — earlier, more deliberately, and more honestly — to the body. The clinical evidence in this article is what gives that argument its weight.

The compound logic runs in both directions. Inflammation, cardiovascular function, strength, mobility, and recovery capacity are shaped over time, which gives earlier attention a longer runway. But the window does not simply close at a particular age. Thoughtful intervention can still improve function, capacity, and quality of life later in adulthood. During cancer treatment and survivorship, fatigue, tissue injury, deconditioning, and late treatment effects can also shape long-term function alongside the underlying disease itself.

This is the healthspan math. It is the gap between the lifespan number on your projected mortality table and the healthspan number — your last decade of independence, mobility, cognitive function, and dignity. The evidence reviewed here does not establish that these modalities extend an individual's lifespan or alter their lifetime healthspan trajectory. What the individual-modality research does suggest is that specific interventions may improve specific outcomes — reduced inflammation in some populations, faster recovery from radiation injury in others, improved cardiovascular markers with regular use in still others. Whether stacked, sustained use of these modalities meaningfully changes overall healthspan trajectory across a lifetime is not yet an established finding in the literature. It remains a hypothesis worth studying — not a conclusion the current literature can yet support.

That is what we mean when we say InfraCore exists to help you add life to your years.

A Personal Note from the Founder

I want to be honest with you about who is writing this article. I am the customer described in our companion piece on The Wellness Investor — a Gen X woman whose body still remembers every injury she thought she'd bounce back from. Two devastating knee injuries before I graduated high school. Multiple ankle injuries on top of them. Decades of chronic pain that have shaped how I move through every day since.

Most of my generation has some version of this story. The bills from years of playing through pain, working through it, and treating our bodies like they were indestructible are coming due now. And the generation ahead of us — the parents we love, those of us lucky enough to still have them — are showing us, in real time, what the back half of life looks like when the years pile up and a body has nothing left in reserve. Watching it changes how you think about your own next twenty years.

That is why InfraCore exists. It is why I have spent the last two years immersed in the research behind the technologies discussed here. The questions behind these modalities are not abstractions to me. I use light-based recovery technology on my own body, and I evaluate the other technologies discussed here through the same deeply personal lens: could this help me — or someone I love — remain active, capable, independent, and fully engaged in life for longer? These are also technologies I wish had been more accessible to the generation ahead of mine, when the math might have run a different way.

If this article reads like it came from someone who is herself in the audience for it, that is because it did.

I am not writing to you. I am writing alongside you. This is the homework I did for myself first.

The research matters. The evidence matters. But the reason I spent two years reading it is personal. I want the same thing many of our clients want: to stay active, capable, independent, and fully engaged in life for as many years as possible.

This article was researched carefully. But it was lived first.

— Bree

Closing: What the Evidence Can—and Cannot—Tell Us

InfraCore Wellness sells the categories of systems discussed above — hyperbaric oxygen chambers, red light therapy panels, cryosaunas, infrared saunas — and this article represents our best synthesis of the peer-reviewed evidence for how these modalities are used as adjunct therapies. The manufacturers we work with are professional-grade brands with multi-year warranties, chosen for quality of equipment and depth of clinical use in professional wellness and rehabilitation settings. The peer-reviewed evidence discussed here is drawn from the broader clinical research literature and does not represent device-level performance claims for any specific InfraCore-carried product.

If you take one thing from this article, take this: the right way to think about wellness technology — for chronic illness, for cancer survivorship, for healthy aging, for the long arc of healthspan — is as a set of distinct adjunctive modalities, each with its own evidence base, limitations, protocols, and appropriate applications — applied carefully, integrated with medical care, and matched to the person and the condition. The marketing claims you have read about any of these modalities are almost certainly overstated. The peer-reviewed evidence is almost certainly more measured, more specific, and more interesting than that marketing.

If you would like a Wellness Concierge to walk you through which of these modalities matches your goals, your space, and your investment level, reach out here. If you would prefer to keep reading on your own, every section above links to the deeper Wellness Library piece that covers it.

Frequently Asked Questions

References and Source Reading

The citations below correspond to the footnotes in the article above. Where a citation refers to an active clinical trial, the trial registration and outcome readouts will continue to mature; we update this article as published results become available.

1. Garmany A, Terzic A. Global Healthspan-Lifespan Gaps Among 183 World Health Organization Member States. JAMA Network Open. 2024;7(12):e2450241. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.50241. Secondary reference: World Health Organization, Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) at birth, WHO Global Health Observatory. ↩
2. Dejonckheere CS, et al. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for chronic radiotherapy-related adverse effects: A clinically focused review. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. 2026;76(1):e70058. doi:10.3322/caac.70058. Reviewed evidence for HBOT in soft tissue radiation fibrosis, osteoradionecrosis, and radiation cystitis in cancer survivors. ↩
3. Two active Phase II trials referenced in this section: (a) ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06811870 — neoadjuvant HBOT in breast cancer; (b) ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06742411 — XELOX, sintilimab, and HBOT in gastric cancer. Primary-endpoint readouts, protocol details, and enrollment status should be verified through ClinicalTrials.gov directly. This article does not endorse any single active trial's design or provisional results. ↩
4. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. LTU-904 Portable Laser Therapy Unit. 510(k) K030295. Decision date December 23, 2004. The device was found substantially equivalent for use as a tool as part of a therapy regimen for post-mastectomy lymphedema. The clearance is device-specific and indication-specific and does not extend to generic red light panels or other PBM indications. ↩
5. Representative indication-specific sources for the PBM applications discussed above. Oral mucositis (guideline-level). Zadik Y, Arany PR, Fregnani ER, et al. Systematic review of photobiomodulation for the management of oral mucositis in cancer patients and clinical practice guidelines. Supportive Care in Cancer. 2019;27(10):3969–3983. doi:10.1007/s00520-019-04890-2. Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. Lodewijckx J, Robijns J, Bensadoun RJ, Mebis J. Photobiomodulation Therapy for the Management of Chemotherapy-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy: An Overview. Photobiomodulation, Photomedicine, and Laser Surgery. 2020;38(6):348–354. doi:10.1089/photob.2019.4771. Radiation-induced dermatitis. Gobbo M, Rico V, Marta GN, et al. Photobiomodulation therapy for the prevention of acute radiation dermatitis: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Supportive Care in Cancer. 2023;31(4):227. doi:10.1007/s00520-023-07673-y. Wound healing. Taha N, Daoud H, Malik T, Shettysowkoor J, Rahman S. The Effects of Low-Level Laser Therapy on Wound Healing and Pain Management in Skin Wounds: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Cureus. 2024;16(10):e72542. doi:10.7759/cureus.72542. Oncologic safety. Bensadoun RJ, Epstein JB, Nair RG, et al. Safety and efficacy of photobiomodulation therapy in oncology: A systematic review. Cancer Medicine. 2020;9(22):8279–8300. doi:10.1002/cam4.3582. Available human studies at therapeutic doses have not identified an increased tumor-growth or recurrence signal in oncology populations, but that safety observation is separate from efficacy and does not establish PBM as safe for all cancer populations without oncology-team coordination. ↩
6. He J, Zhang X, Ge Z, Shi J, Guo S, Chen J. Whole-body cryotherapy can reduce the inflammatory response in humans: a meta-analysis based on 11 randomized controlled trials. Scientific Reports. 2025;15:7759. doi:10.1038/s41598-025-90396-3. Pooled analysis of 11 randomized controlled trials, 274 total participants, with individual trial samples of 5–32. Documented pooled changes in IL-1β (decreased) and IL-10 (increased); IL-6, TNF-α, and CRP did not reach statistical significance. Authors flagged high heterogeneity and small sample sizes as substantial sources of uncertainty. ↩
7. Laukkanen T, Khan H, Zaccardi F, Laukkanen JA. Association Between Sauna Bathing and Fatal Cardiovascular and All-Cause Mortality Events. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2015;175(4):542–548. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.8187. Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD). Hazard ratios for sauna frequency 4–7×/week vs 1×/week: sudden cardiac death HR 0.37, fatal CHD HR 0.52, all-cause mortality HR 0.60. ↩
8. Laukkanen T, Kunutsor SK, Kauhanen J, Laukkanen JA. Sauna bathing is inversely associated with dementia and Alzheimer's disease in middle-aged Finnish men. Age and Ageing. 2017;46(2):245–249. doi:10.1093/ageing/afw212. KIHD cohort follow-up. Hazard ratio for dementia at sauna frequency 4–7×/week: HR 0.34. ↩
9. Sastriques-Dunlop S, Elizondo-Benedetto S, Zayed MA. Sauna use as a novel management approach for cardiovascular health and peripheral arterial disease. Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine. 2025;12:1537194. doi:10.3389/fcvm.2025.1537194. The paper proposes heat therapy as a potential adjunctive management strategy ("HT practices might be beneficial as adjunctive management strategies, in addition to or as alternatives to exercise, for management of cardiovascular diseases") for sedentary populations and those who face barriers to traditional exercise. ↩

Further reading from the InfraCore Wellness Library

• The Wellness Investor: Why Your Health Is Your Most Important Long-Term Asset
• Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Explained
• Red Light Therapy Explained
• What Is Photobiomodulation?
• Cold Plunge vs. Cryotherapy
• Beyond Pain Management: Research on Recovery Modalities
• Recovery After Injury or Surgery

This article was researched and written by the InfraCore Wellness team. It is educational content, not medical advice. If you are managing a chronic condition, working through cancer treatment, or supporting a loved one through either, please coordinate any new modality with your physician or care team. To speak with a Wellness Concierge about which of these systems matches your goals, space, and investment level, call (877) 414-3717 or reach out here.