Cryotherapy, or cold therapy, cools the body using freezing or near-freezing temperatures to help reduce inflammation. Whole-body cryotherapy is a common form of cryotherapy that involves standing in a freezing, non-medical-grade chamber at a spa or wellness center. Cryotherapy also includes cold-water immersion, ice application, and cryosurgery.
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Fans of whole-body cryotherapy boast it helps improve muscle recovery, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic pain, anxiety, and weight loss efforts. But despite cryotherapy chambers popping up across the country, there is limited evidence that non-medical cryotherapy offers legitimate health benefits. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also not approved whole-body cryotherapy chambers as a safe or effective way to treat medical conditions or exercise recovery efforts.
Here's what to know about cryotherapy's uses, benefits, and risks.
How Cryotherapy Works
Cryotherapy&#;with the exception of cryosurgery&#;is used to reduce pain and swelling from an injury or inflammation. Since inflammation is often the root of many health issues, cryotherapy may help indirectly alleviate inflammation-related conditions. However, this idea is primarily theoretical.
Cryotherapy generally helps reduce inflammation by reducing blood flow to particular areas. When exposed to cold temperatures, your body constricts your blood vessels (aka vasoconstriction). This allows blood to move to your organs and gain more oxygen. When your body starts to warm up and returns to its normal temperature, your blood vessels expand (aka vasodilation). That oxygen-rich blood then moves to your tissues and helps push out inflammation.
Proponents of whole-body cryotherapy believe cryogenic chambers help kick off the body's cold temperature response in a similar way. However, there isn't enough research to prove cryogenic chambers effectively reduce inflammation like other cold therapy treatments.
Types of Cryotherapy
When people hear cryotherapy, they often think of freezing chambers, but cryotherapy technically includes multiple cold therapies.
Whole-Body Cryotherapy
During a whole-body cryotherapy session, you'll enter a chamber that's cooled to negative -200 to -300 degrees Fahrenheit (-129 to -184 degrees Celsius) for two to four minutes. These chambers are cooled using liquid nitrogen vapors or cool air that circulates around your body. Typically, your head is outside the chamber, while the rest of your body is exposed to supercooling temperatures. Sometimes multiple people enter a fully-enclosed chamber. Either way, you'll enter a cryogenic chamber naked or nearly naked, with gloves, socks, or slippers to help protect your extremities. (Undergarments are optional for women but required for men).
Cold-Water Immersion
Cold-water immersion (aka cold water therapy) includes ice baths, cold water plunges, or cold showers. During cold-water immersion, you'll typically submerge your body below the neck in 50 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15 degrees Celsius) water for 5-15 minutes. This form of cryotherapy is typically used to help reduce soreness after exercise.
Ice Application
Applying ice packs is a first-line treatment for injuries like sprains, strains, and fractures. Icing is also used to help reduce pain after exercise. After an injury, ice can help reduce pain, swelling, and inflammation. It is typically combined with rest, compression, and elevation as part of the R-I-C-E to help speed healing.
Cryosurgery
Cryoblation, or cryosurgery, is a surgical procedure that uses extreme cold from liquid nitrogen or argon gas to freeze off or destroy abnormal tissue. Performed by a healthcare provider, cryosurgery can remove warts, skin tags, and pre-cancerous skin growths outside the body. In addition, cryosurgery is used externally to remove pre-cancerous skin growths and internally to destroy cancerous cells related to retinoblastoma, skin cancer, early-stage prostate cancer, liver cancer, and bone cancer.
Benefits of Cryotherapy
Cryotherapy is often hyped as a miracle treatment for mental health conditions, muscle recovery, chronic pain, and inflammation-related health conditions. But despite claims, there isn't enough evidence to prove that whole-body cryotherapy is effective. Here are some of the potential benefits of cryotherapy.
Muscle Recovery
Many athletes have popularized cryotherapy as a way to improve muscle recovery after exercise, but research is limited and mixed. A Chinese study of 12 runners found that whole-body cryotherapy reduced muscle damage and inflammation more effectively than cold-water immersion. Another small study had similar results and found that whole-body cryotherapy decreased muscle pain and inflammation. However, a review found that whole-body cryotherapy did not significantly reduce muscle soreness.
Chronic Pain Relief
Cryotherapies like ice application and cold-water immersion can temporarily numb the skin, which may reduce pain. However, there is not enough evidence to prove cryotherapy reduces inflammation-related chronic pain. In a review, researchers found that whole-body cryotherapy and ice application offered short-term pain relief for patients with rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis (inflammatory arthritis that affects the spine). However, the cryotherapy protocols varied, and the effect on long-term pain wasn't explored.
Skin Conditions and Cancer
Cryosurgery is an effective and safe way to destroy cancerous cells and remove skin lesions, moles, and warts. Some old research claims that non-medical cryotherapies may help treat itching and inflammation linked to eczema, but these findings are not well substantiated. Despite these findings, whole-body cryotherapy isn't an effective eczema treatment. The American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) also does not recommend whole-body cryotherapy since it can injure your skin.
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Sleep
There is not enough evidence that cryotherapy improves your Zzz's. Still, some studies have found links between cryotherapy and sleep quality. Research on muscle recovery in runners found cryotherapy helped improve sleep quality. Whole-body cryotherapy specifically appeared to help runners sleep the best. Another study found men who did post-workout whole-body cryotherapy slept with less disturbed movement. They also reported better sleep than those who didn't have cryotherapy.
Risks of Cryotherapy
Spending too much time in any freezing condition can injure your skin. However, whole-body cryotherapy has more risks since it puts your body in below-freezing temperatures. In addition, the FDA has not approved any whole-body cryotherapy devices for safety and effectiveness.
Potential risks of whole-body cryotherapy include:
Keep in mind that you might feel a bit sore, numb, tingly, and may even experience some pain the first time you try cryotherapy. This is normal, and should go away within 24 hours. Cryotherapy can also worsen health conditions like nerve damage, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Pregnant people should also avoid cryotherapy. If you have any health conditions, talk with your healthcare provider before trying cryotherapy treatments, especially whole-body cryotherapy.
A Quick Review
Cryotherapy includes treatments that use freezing or nearly freezing temperatures to reduce inflammation. Cryosurgery is the only cryotherapy medical procedure proven to remove abnormal skin growths and treat cancer.
Limited research shows that whole-body cryotherapy may help muscle recovery, pain, and sleep. However, we need more evidence to prove it's an effective method for treating health conditions, chronic pain, sleep, and muscle soreness. In addition, the FDA has not approved any whole-body cryotherapy devices to treat these conditions.
Cryotherapy is often used to quicken muscle recovery post-exercise.
To understand why, we first need to understand what happens to the body when it becomes chilled and reheated. First, your body responds to cold temps by constricting your blood vessels (known as vasoconstriction), sending all your blood toward your organs. When this happens, your blood acquires more oxygen and nutrients, explains Gregg Larivee, doctor of chiropractic and founder and CEO of Integrated Medical Center in Jupiter, Florida.
Then, once you leave the cold and your body warms up again, your blood vessels expand (known as vasodilation), sending oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood back to your tissues. This increased blood flow flushes out inflammation and toxins you built up during your workout, helping kick-start recovery, Dr. Larivee explains.
For example, a study published in February in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research out of China found that WBC reduced muscle damage and inflammation in middle- and long-distance runners better than other forms of cryotherapy and no cryotherapy (control). Unfortunately, the study was small (only 12 runners), so it&#;s hard to say how these findings might apply to greater populations.
That said, past studies also reported decreases in muscle pain and inflammation from using WBC post-exercise, according to a past opinion paper. However, the authors of another past systematic review concluded that there isn&#;t enough evidence to determine whether WBC actually helps recovery after exercise better than rest.
Dr. Arent also warns that cryotherapy may limit how well your muscles adapt to resistance training. &#;[Cryotherapy] appears to reduce muscle protein synthesis, [the process that drives responses to exercise], so strength gains are not as great,&#; he says.
Based on the current evidence, cryotherapy may help with sleep, according to Arent.
For example, the aforementioned Chinese study in middle- and long-distance runners not only found that WBC reduced muscle damage and inflammation after exercise but also that subjects reported better sleep quality after WBC than other forms of cryotherapy.
In addition, a study published in March in BMC Research Notes found that soccer players moved less during the night (measured via wrist devices) and reported better sleep after three minutes of partial-body cryotherapy (PBC) than after shorter sessions. (PBC is similar to WBC, except that your head and neck are outside the cryochamber.) And a study published in July in the European Journal of Sport Science reveals similar findings: Active men who received WBC after an evening workout tossed and turned less during the night and reported better sleep than those who didn&#;t.
Researchers speculate that cryotherapy may help us sleep by helping to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the &#;rest and digest&#; side of the autonomic (or &#;automatic&#;) nervous system, which takes over managing your bodily functions when we feel calm and safe, explains the Cleveland Clinic. And when the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, we tend to be in a relaxed state.
However, more research is needed to determine if and how cryotherapy may improve sleep in nonathletic populations, and larger studies are necessary to more fully understand the relationship between cold therapy and sleep quality.
Cryotherapy may relieve chronic pain in a couple of different ways.
First, cold is a known short-term analgesic (or pain reliever). Think: Placing an ice pack on a sprained ankle. Scientists believe cold works by slowing nerve transmission (when a nerve fires a signal to the brain) in pain cells, per a review published in December in Pain and Therapy.
Cryotherapy may also lessen pain by lowering inflammation, a hallmark of inflammatory-related chronic pain conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis (an inflammatory disease of the spine), according to a research paper published in December in Nature Medicine.
In fact, after reviewing 25 studies, the authors of the review in Pain and Therapy concluded that cryotherapy could be an easy, low-risk option for managing chronic pain. In particular, pain associated with chronic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. WBC and ice application were the two cryotherapy methods found to offer pain relief. However, research on the long-term effects of cryotherapy on chronic pain, and more standardized treatment protocols, is needed.
WBC may also help lower inflammation and relieve itching in people with atopic dermatitis (eczema), a chronic skin condition characterized by dry, inflamed skin. For a small past study, 16 adults with mild to moderate atopic dermatitis underwent WBC at -166 degrees F for one to three minutes, three times a week for one month. Atopic dermatitis symptoms improved for most patients, though the study sample was too small to draw meaningful conclusions.
Currently, and a note of importance, the American Academy of Dermatology Association discourages the use of WBC as a treatment for atopic dermatitis.
Spending time in the cold may speed up your metabolism as your body works to stay warm. Theoretically, if you increase your calorie burn, you may be able to create the calorie deficit needed to lose weight.
In a study published in April in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16 control lean women and 15 obese women underwent PBC for 150 minutes a day at -202 degrees F, for five days. By the end of the study, the lean women were burning 8.2 percent more calories at rest (known as resting energy expenditure, or REE), while the obese women were burning 5.5 percent more calories at rest than they were on day one.
While these findings are interesting, we can&#;t know how long these changes in REE would last, or whether they would result in weight loss, and because this study was so small, further research in larger populations are needed.
Some forms of cryotherapy &#; namely, cryoablation or cryosurgery (a surgical procedure using extreme cold) &#; are used medically by surgeons and other types of certified healthcare providers, and for specific procedures aiming to address certain conditions.
For example, a dermatologist may use cryoablation to treat abnormal tissue, and some surgeons may use this technique to destroy certain cancers. It&#;s important to note that cryoablation is a different form of cryotherapy than the healing, supportive approaches discussed above. That said, here are two medical benefits to cryotherapy techniques used in a clinical setting:
Cryotherapy is a common method for treating some cancers, including prostate and liver cancer, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The therapy is called cryoablation, and it involves freezing tumor cells inside the body. The tumor cells can&#;t survive extreme cold, and die as a result, according to a past research article.
Cryoablation is a minimally invasive procedure. To do it, the doctor inserts an instrument called a cryoprobe through a small incision in the skin and applies the cold (a substance like liquid nitrogen or argon gas) with a spraying device, per the Cleveland Clinic.
However, cryoablation can only be used to treat tumors that can be seen through imaging tests, such as mammograms, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Moreover, doctors are still unsure how cryoablation might control cancer or impact life expectancy over the long term, per the NCI.
Cryotherapy is also sometimes used to treat benign (not cancerous), precancerous, or superficially cancerous skin cancer, according to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Freezing specific areas of the skin causes it to blister and peel off, allowing new, healthy skin to grow in its place, explains the Cleveland Clinic.
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