I have heard that the more tattoos you get the stronger your immune system becomes. The idea is that your immune system is trying to protect the body from the ink that is now implanted into your body and it works to make the wound heal, so overtime the more tattoos you get the more your body starts to work on fighting off the ink which is almost like a “foreign invader” in your body. Is this actually true?
This idea bottles down to the correlation between Immunoglobulin A and tattoos. Immunoglobulin is an antibody that has an important role in the immune system by protecting and responding to specific bacteria and viruses that try to invade the body. Researchers from the University of Alabama discovered that getting multiple tattoos would be equivalent to the immunoglobulin in your body. It seems odd that having many tattoos would lead to your body being able to fight off more common infections than if you were to have just one tattoo. The research team discovered that people who just got one tattoo would actually have a huge drop in their resistance to fighting off infections due to their rise in cortisol levels.
I shared this information with my friend and she said it was totally true. She even shared her story with me about how when she got her first tattoo, which was a key on her wrist, that a week after she had to go to the doctor since she felt really sick and ended up with bronchitis. Her doctor had told her that her immune resistance was low since it had been working on healing her tattoo rather than her illness.
But after she got her second tattoo on her back, it actually healed faster and she did not get sick. She explained to me that with her first tattoo it scabbed over and with her second one there was no scabbing. The scabbing was a mechanism for healing, so since the second healed way faster it did not scab, since the body was already used to this foreign ink exposed on her body.
This concept of the more tattoos the more strong your immune system is, is quite interesting. Although the Alabama team’s research only consisted of 24 women and 5 men, which is too small of a sample size to conclude anything, it seems believable, especially after hearing what my friend had to say. I would like there to be more research done on this topic!
Works Cited:
http://www.sciencealert.com/getting-multiple-tattoos-can-strengthen-your-immune-system
http://www.marieclaire.com/health-fitness/news/a19258/tattoo-health-study/
Picture: http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/ktrk/images/cms/1247026_630x354.jpg
Key – Amanda Bancalari Freshman at PSU
This is an interesting theory that I had never heard of. As someone who has always been anti-tattoo, this is the first positive that I understand and agree with. However, there are still dangers to tattoos found here http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/tattoos-and-piercings/art-20045067.
This is a very interesting topic. I have never heard about this before, so when I first saw your title I thought that it couldn’t be true. After reading your article, though, it kind of makes sense as to how it is true. I guess this is a good way for a teenager to convince their parents to let them get a tattoo. The link below talks about how the more tattoos you get, the stronger your immune system will be, and why this is the case.
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/03/15/new-study-shows-having-lots-of-tattoos-might-be-good-for-your-he/21328249/
I loove tattoos. I plan to have a bunch by the time I’m old enough to be a grandmother. I’ll probably still be getting new ones by that time too… One of my favorite things about tattoos is the idea of how someone can love something so much they decide to ink it permanently on their bodies. I found this article on the societal and psychological backgrounds behind tattoos.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/swim-in-denial/201310/if-tattoos-could-talk
I love tattoos, I have one of my own rights now and am planning to get another rather soon. Tattoos have been around since the dawn of time and around different cultures with different techniques. I’ve heard of this topic before scrolling through social media and I was honestly ecstatic. It was just another reason to get a tattoo(even though at first it seemed just correlated not really causation) but the more than I read this blog, I agree with you that the sample size was extremely small therefore I’m not sure if I would believe that tattoos actually improved your immune system. But they are sure addictive! Once you get one you just want to get more.
I found an article talking about how stress can affect you while you are getting a tattoo and you can even catch a cold because your defense is lowered from the stress of getting a tattooed. http://metro.co.uk/2016/03/11/heres-why-youre-more-likely-to-catch-a-cold-after-getting-a-tattoo-5746730/