People get tattoos for many reasons: to mark a special event, to cover a scar or purely for the art. Those tattoos could lead to health complications, however, a new study finds.
A new study finds tattoos can hinder the skin’s ability to sweat efficiently, which “may have important ramification when patients have fever or illness or are overheated and may have problems with thermoregulation,” Dr. Michele Green, a dermatologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told HealthDay.
“The popularity of decorative skin tattoos has increased in the last decade to become normative withing popular western culture,” wrote study lead author Scott Davis of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
About 24% of Americans, from late childhood to age 60, have at least one tattoo, Davis wrote, and “the prevalence of tattoos among younger individuals, professional athletes, and military populations is even higher.”
Tattooing involves repeated needle insertions to deposit ink into the skin. According to the new study, these punctures might damage the body’s eccrine glands.
There are two kinds of sweat glands: eccrine and apocrine. Eccrine glands occur over most of your body and open directly onto the surface of your skin. Apocrine glands open into the hair follicle, leading to the surface of the skin. Apocrine glands develop in areas abundant in hair follicles, such as on your scalp, armpits and groin.
“Modern tattooing techniques involve repetitively puncturing the skin with a series of needles 50 to 3,000 time per minute to permanently deposit pigments or ink at a depth of 1-5 mm into the dermal layer of the skin,” Davis wrote.
For the new study, researchers recruited 10 people — five women and five men — with at least 5.6 centimeters (about the size of a golf tee) of tattooed skin on their upper or lower arm. They also needed to have the same amount of inkless skin adjacent to the tattoo.
The test subjects were fitted with special suits that regulated their body temperature, raising it enough to induce sweating.
According to the study, both tattooed and inkless skin began sweating at the same time. Inked skin produced less sweat, however.
“Decreased sweating in tattooed skin could impact heat dissipation especially when tattooing covers a higher percentage of body surface area and could be considered a potential clinical side effect of tattooing,” Davis wrote.
You can read the full study in the Journal of Applied Physiology.
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