Tattoos and medicine may seem an unlikely pair, but medical tattoos are nothing brand new. Religious tattoos of ancient Egyptians honored the gods and, possibly, directed divine healing to ailing body parts. Circa A. D. 150, Galen, a Greek physician working in the Roman Empire, tattooed pigment onto patients’ corneas to reduce glare and improve their eyesight. In the particular past century, people have tattooed their medical histories and even healthcare requests such as “do not resuscitate” on their own wrists plus chests. Modern doctors possess also used tattoos in order to disguise scars and restore the appearance of lost parts of the body, this kind of as nipples for mastectomy patients.
Today, that history comes full circle as researchers try to determine if tattooing can give health care providers a better way to administer drugs and vaccines.
It was only within 2018 that scientists figured out exactly what happens in the immune system when you get a tattoo. They identified macrophages , a type of immune cell, as critical players. Macrophages are part of the first responder unit of immune cells, also known as innate immunity. To understand what macrophages do, look no further than the Greek roots of its name: Macro phage means large eater. These pliable cells travel through the bloodstream plus target microbial invaders in tissues, engulfing and “eating” them, thus clearing infections. Often , the particular response is so fast and effective that we don’t realize we’ve been infected at all.
Macrophages are also the accomplices that make tattoos permanent. When a tattoo needle punctures the skin, it tears apart the tissue in its path — releasing chemical distress signals that will attract immune cells to the damage site and put adjacent tissues on high alert. A typical tattoo will inflict hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, associated with these puncture wounds. Macrophages near the tattoo site, ever on the prowl, ingest any foreign substance they find — in this case, targeting the particular ink the tattoo artist has applied. In a twist that researchers still don’t fully understand, the particular macrophage “eats” the ink but cannot destroy this.
The macrophage then does one of two things: carry the printer ink away to a nearby lymph node for disposal, or sit there, hunkering down with other macrophages and forming the blockade, called a granuloma, to isolate the pathogen from uninfected tissues. (The macrophage motto: “If you can’t destroy them, trap them. ”) When a person get a tattoo, some of your macrophages sit and hold the ink to “protect” you, in the process becoming guardians of your own tattoo design.
Your tattoo design, after that, is an artful, exterior display of your body’s immune response.
Tattoo artists have got harnessed the body’s defense network in order to inscribe plus preserve art within your skin. It begs the question: The reason why can’t experts leverage the particular same approach to advance medical treatments?
In 2016, the American Academy of Dermatology estimated that 1 in 4 people within the U. S. are impacted by skin ailments such because microbial bacterial infections or cancers. Another study, in 2019, reported that Americans spend $13. 8 billion battling skin and soft cells infections each year. Physicians treat serious skin infections by giving patients intravenous or even oral medication, which can be costly and can cause side effects. Minor infections might respond to topical ointments plus creams, but these do not always reach their targets.
Tattooing medications into infected tissues might work better. In a proof-of-concept research using laboratory mice with cutaneous leishmaniasis, a parasitic skin infection marked by inflamed lesions, researchers administered an anti-parasitic drug using three routes: administering it topically since a cream, injecting this into the torso along with hypodermic needles (the kind widely used within health care) and using the commercial skin image needle to inject medicine into the contamination site. Needling treatment in to the wound decreased parasite numbers and decreased lesion size plus tissue inflammation more effectively than the some other techniques. Researchers and pharmaceutical companies are furthermore evaluating a similar mechanism, microneedles, with regard to treating skin infections. Microneedle patches for common woes such as acne are already available.
Tattoos may also ease the particular delivery associated with vaccinations in order to prevent disease. Today, most vaccines are usually administered simply by hypodermic fine needles that inject into the muscle. The particular thicker the particular vaccine, the larger the particular needle — and often, the more painful the injection. Human skill impacts pain levels, too. An shot may hurt more in case an administrator is inexperienced and doesn’t know, regarding instance, how much pressure to apply to the plunger. Tattooing eliminates such problems. Tattoo needles are small compared to traditional hypodermic needles, are designed to hole the pores and skin superficially and may furthermore reduce human error. One research cohort has developed microneedle areas to “tattoo” a vaccine dose. Such designs, which may be stuck to the skin like a simple adhesive bandage, can eliminate administration problems created by human error.
It behooves medicine to innovate when existing techniques fail; as a tattooed immunologist myself, it seems to me that developing tattoos intended for medical applications just makes sense. Tattoo designs, research plus medicine share a rich history, and the convergence of tattoo designs and science is the continuation of the human being desire in order to explore plus innovate — and beautify and prolong our lives.
If medicine will be an artwork, then art too may be medication.
Anh Diep was a 2022 AAAS Mass Media fellow . They hold a doctorate from UC Merced, where they researched valley fever. This article was written to get Zócalo Public Square .