Effect of adding Ozone Sauna in Low Back Pain treatment

Background

Chronic low back pain is one of the most common reasons people seek ozone therapy support, and local ozone injections directly into the affected area are already used by some clinics as a treatment option. Researchers wanted to know whether adding a whole-body ozone sauna session - where ozone gas is applied externally via the skin rather than injected - could improve on the results seen with local injections alone.

Study design

Forty adults with chronic low back pain took part, split into two groups of 20 (12 men and 8 women in each). Both groups received local ozone injections at a concentration of around 7-12 micrograms per millilitre, given twice weekly over 12 sessions. One group received the injections alone, while the second group also had an ozone sauna session added after each injection. Pain levels were assessed before treatment began and again after sessions two, four, six, eight, ten and twelve. The work was first presented at the World Conference on Ozone Therapy in Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary in Ancona, Italy, in 2017, and later published as a conference abstract in the Journal of Ozone Therapy in 2019.

Findings

Patients who received the added ozone sauna sessions showed faster improvement in their pain scores than those who had local injections alone. A greater proportion of patients in the ozone sauna group reported a better overall outcome by the end of the 12-session course, compared with the injection-only group.

What the authors concluded

The authors concluded that adding an ozone sauna to local ozone injections led to faster improvement and a better outcome, with more patients responding well, than using local ozone injections alone for chronic low back pain.

Limitations of this study

This work was published as a conference abstract rather than a full peer-reviewed paper, so key methodological details - such as how patients were allocated to each group, whether assessments were blinded, and the statistical methods used - are not publicly available in full. The sample size was small, at 20 patients per group, which limits how confidently the findings can be generalised. As an abstract, it has not undergone the same level of scrutiny as a full journal article, and to our knowledge the results have not yet been replicated in a larger, fully published trial.