This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Temporary tattoos changed students' opinions about psoriasis

Using temporary tattoos of psoriatic lesions changed medical students’ perceptions about the psychological and physical burdens of psoriasis and eczema in a study.

Sixty-one first-year medical students in Halifax, Nova Scotia, completed the voluntary study. The students initially answered a questionnaire about their understanding of several diseases, including chronic lung disease, arthritis, eczema, ischemic heart disease, psoriasis, depression, hypertension and diabetes. They rated their perception of the severity of each disease from “not severe” to “extremely severe” using a visual analog scale (VAS) 100 mm in length. The students also completed a second questionnaire that assessed their attitudes toward skin diseases.

Lesley Latham

The students then applied a temporary tattoo of a psoriatic lesion to a visible part of their bodies, such as the forearm, neck or hand, and wore it for 24 hours, including time in public. They completed a post-exercise questionnaire the following day.

In the initial questionnaire, psoriasis (mean=23.6) and eczema (mean=23.3) were perceived to have the lowest physical impact. Depression (mean=93.8) and cancer (mean=82.2) received the highest VAS scores for perception of mental impact, while psoriasis and eczema had mean scores of 53.0 and 48.7, respectively.

After wearing the tattoo, the perception of physical impact of eczema (mean=37.3, P<.0001) and psoriasis (mean=37.8, P=.0014) were greater when compared with pre-exercise scores. The perception of mental impact was significantly higher for eczema (mean=66.6, P=.0005) and psoriasis (mean=68.6, P=.0293) than before the exercise, while depression (mean=91.4, P<.0001) and cancer (mean=79.0, P=.03) scored significantly lower.

“The tattoo exercise does not completely simulate the experience of a patient with psoriasis: neither the chronic nature of the disease nor the scaling, pruritic characteristics of psoriatic lesions — factors that significantly impact patient quality of life,” the researchers reported.

“The physical and mental impact of skin disease is often underestimated by medical students, physicians and the general public,” researcher Lesley Latham, MSc, a medical student from Dalhousie University in Halifax, told Healio.com. “Student exercises using temporary tattoos, like the one described in our paper, can serve to promote an understanding of the burdens faced by patients with chronic skin conditions.”