The $379,000 Case for Saunas in Senior Living

Ethan Abramovitz built a sauna in his backyard with his father. He also watched two great-grandparents decline from dementia. Those two facts collided in a way that produced something the sauna industry itself has not: an economic model for deploying saunas in the places where older Americans actually live.

Abramovitz, a high school student at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, New Jersey, founded a nonprofit called Sauna for Seniors in 2025 and published a cost-benefit analysis in December of that year. The paper’s headline finding: outfitting 39 senior-focused facilities in southern New Jersey with prefabricated saunas would cost $378,750 per year and could generate $5.6 million to $18.8 million in avoided healthcare costs over five years. That implies a benefit-to-cost ratio of 14.8-to-1 at the low end and 49.6-to-1 at the high end.

Those numbers are worth examining. So are the assumptions behind them.

Key Facts

Organization: Sauna for Seniors, Voorhees, New Jersey (nonprofit)

Founder: Ethan M. Abramovitz, Eastern Regional High School

Paper published: December 14, 2025

Study area: Southern New Jersey suburbs outside Philadelphia

Target locations: 39 (20 senior residential developments, 15 senior activity centers, 4 YMCAs)

Locations with existing saunas: 8 of 39 (20%)

Target cohort: 12,888 adults aged 65+

Dementia prevalence in cohort (estimated): 10.9%

Cost per sauna unit (purchase, installation, maintenance): $7,500

Total annual program cost: $378,750

Projected five-year savings (at 2.5% adherence): $5.6 million to $18.8 million

Benefit-to-cost ratio: 14.8:1 to 49.6:1

Key underlying source: Laukkanen et al., Age and Ageing, 2017

What the Paper Does

The analysis is not a clinical study. It is an economic model: a mapping exercise that counts where seniors in one New Jersey region congregate, estimates how many of them are living with or at risk of neurodegenerative disease, and calculates what it would cost to put a three-person prefabricated electric sauna in each location.

Abramovitz identified 39 candidate sites across southern New Jersey, including 20 senior residential developments (home to an estimated 8,888 residents aged 65 and older), 15 senior activity and recreation centers, and four YMCA locations. Only eight of the 39 already had saunas available. The total addressable cohort: roughly 12,888 older adults.

Using 2025 Alzheimer’s Association data, the paper estimates that 10.9% of the cohort is living with dementia (including Alzheimer’s) and 1.9% with Parkinson’s disease, yielding about 1,663 people in the target population currently affected by neurodegenerative conditions. Each sauna unit would cost $7,500 including purchase, installation, and maintenance, with an additional $750 per location per year for educational outreach.

The paper then applies a figure from Finnish epidemiological research: a 65% lower risk of dementia associated with frequent sauna use. At full adherence across the cohort, the projected annual cost savings would be $44.7 million to $150.2 million. The paper applies a conservative 2.5% adherence rate, yielding the $5.6 million to $18.8 million five-year range.

The Finnish Data That Drives the Model

The 65% risk-reduction figure that anchors the entire analysis comes from a single landmark study: a 2017 paper published in Age and Ageing by Tanjaniina Laukkanen, Setor Kunutsor, Jussi Kauhanen, and Jari A. Laukkanen. The study drew on the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD), a long-running Finnish cohort that has produced some of the most-cited findings on sauna and health.

The headline numbers: men who used a sauna four to seven times per week had a hazard ratio of 0.34 for dementia (95% confidence interval: 0.16 to 0.71) and 0.35 for Alzheimer’s disease (95% CI: 0.14 to 0.90), compared to men who used a sauna once per week. A 66% relative risk reduction. It was one of the first population-scale findings linking sauna frequency to cognitive outcomes, and it has been widely cited across the wellness and longevity industries ever since.

But the study has boundaries that matter for the Sauna for Seniors model. The KIHD cohort consisted of 2,315 men, all middle-aged (42 to 60 years old) at baseline, all living in eastern Finland, followed for a median of 20.7 years. The study included no women. The participants were not elderly at enrollment. And the sauna culture in eastern Finland (high-heat sessions at 175 to 195 degrees Fahrenheit, often multiple times per week as a lifelong practice) is categorically different from what a prefabricated three-person electric unit in a New Jersey senior center would deliver.

A broader Finnish study by Knekt and colleagues, published in Preventive Medicine Reports in 2020, followed 13,994 men and women for 39 years. It found a more modest association: a hazard ratio of 0.81 for frequent bathers. The inclusion of women and the longer follow-up make it a useful counterpoint, but the effect size is considerably smaller than the 65% reduction that drives the Sauna for Seniors model.

Where the Analysis Reaches Beyond Its Data

Three assumptions in the paper deserve direct scrutiny.

First, the model applies findings from middle-aged Finnish men to a mixed-gender American population aged 65 and older. Whether the neuroprotective association observed in the KIHD cohort transfers across sex, age at first exposure, and cultural context is an open question. The gap between observational association and causal intervention is one the sauna industry has historically been slow to acknowledge.

Second, the paper assumes a 1:1 relationship between risk reduction and cost reduction. A 65% lower risk of developing dementia becomes a 65% reduction in the cost of treating it. The paper acknowledges this assumption “would require further analysis to confirm,” and that is a significant caveat. Disease cost is not a simple function of incidence; it includes severity, duration of care, comorbidities, and the structure of insurance and out-of-pocket spending.

Third, the underlying data is observational. The KIHD study measured an association between sauna frequency and dementia incidence. It did not (and could not) control for every confounding variable: people who use a sauna four to seven times per week in Finland may also exercise more, socialize more, and have different stress profiles than those who use one once a week. The confidence intervals in the Laukkanen study (0.16 to 0.71 for dementia) are wide enough to indicate meaningful uncertainty in the point estimate.

None of this invalidates the concept. It means the benefit-to-cost ratio of 14.8:1 to 49.6:1 should be understood as an advocacy scenario, not a validated forecast.

What the Paper Gets Right

Methodological caveats aside, the Sauna for Seniors analysis identifies a real gap.

The sauna industry has spent years citing the Laukkanen dementia data in marketing materials, investor presentations, and longevity-economy pitch decks. What it has not done is build a deployment model for the population most directly implicated by that research: older adults in congregate living settings where a single capital expenditure could serve hundreds of people.

Senior residential developments and activity centers are, on paper, near-ideal deployment sites. The infrastructure exists. The target population is concentrated. The capital cost is low (a $7,500 prefabricated unit is a rounding error in the operating budget of most senior living communities). And the social dimension of shared sauna use, which research has linked to improved mental wellbeing, maps directly onto one of the most persistent challenges in senior care: isolation.

That 80% of the 39 surveyed locations in southern New Jersey lacked any sauna access is a small data point, but it suggests the industry has not been thinking seriously about this market segment.

The Trial Worth Watching

The scientific question underneath all of this may be closer to an answer than it has ever been. The FIGHT-AD trial (NCT06023407), registered on ClinicalTrials.gov and published in protocol form in Frontiers in Neurology, is the first randomized controlled trial designed to test whether heat therapy can reduce Alzheimer’s disease risk. Results are pending.

If FIGHT-AD or a similar trial produces positive results, the policy case for sauna access in senior living will shift from “the epidemiology is suggestive” to “there is interventional evidence.” The mechanistic groundwork is already in place: heat exposure upregulates heat shock proteins implicated in clearing misfolded proteins associated with neurodegeneration, modulates inflammatory pathways, and has been shown to improve cerebrovascular function in preclinical studies. A 2021 paper by Rhonda Patrick and Teresa Johnson in Experimental Gerontology reviewed the broader case for sauna use as a “lifestyle practice to extend healthspan.”

The U.S. burden of dementia care, meanwhile, continues to grow. The USC Schaeffer Center estimated the total cost of dementia in the United States at $781 billion in 2025, a figure that includes $302 billion in quality-of-life valuations and $233 billion in unpaid caregiving alongside $232 billion in direct medical and long-term care costs. The Alzheimer’s Association projects 12.7 million Americans will be living with Alzheimer’s by 2050 without a medical breakthrough.

Against that backdrop, even a modest intervention that costs $7,500 per site and might reduce risk by some fraction of 65% starts to look like a conversation worth having.

The Founder and the Organization

Abramovitz launched Sauna for Seniors from Voorhees, New Jersey, while still in high school. Two of his great-grandparents suffered from dementia. He also volunteers at a local assisted living facility, where the daily realities of cognitive decline are difficult to ignore.

The organization runs three programs: free educational presentations at senior centers and 55+ communities, a mobile sauna program in partnership with unnamed “leading contributors in the North American sauna movement,” and a sauna donation program that aims to place prefabricated units in senior facilities at no cost. Glenn Auerbach at SaunaTimes profiled the organization in June 2025 and has served as an informal advisor. South Jersey media covered the group’s first presentation at Parkers Bend Retirement Community in Moorestown.

Whether Sauna for Seniors can scale beyond educational presentations into actual sauna placements remains to be seen. The organization is small, funded by friends, family, and individual donations. But the cost-benefit framework it has produced is the kind of document that a senior living operator, a YMCA regional director, or a public health department could pick up and run with tomorrow.

Why It Matters

The sauna industry sells to hotels, gyms, and homeowners. It has largely ignored the 55+ residential sector, a market of roughly 29,000 assisted living communities and tens of thousands of independent senior developments in the United States. The Finnish epidemiological data on sauna use and dementia risk has been available since 2017, and the first randomized controlled trial (FIGHT-AD) is now underway. A high school student in New Jersey identified the deployment gap before the industry did. Whether or not the specific benefit-to-cost ratios in the Sauna for Seniors paper hold up under peer review, the underlying question (what would it actually cost to put saunas where older Americans live, and what might the return look like?) is one the industry should have been asking years ago.