Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma

https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/possible-association-between-tattoos-and-lymphoma-revealed

by belter • 2 years ago

217 196 2 years ago

lunduniversity.lu.se

If the correlation is proven true then that’s obviously terrible, but I’m in my mid 40s now, tattoo-less, and one of my biggest regrets is not getting a couple tattoos when I was younger. I feel like doing it now looks like a midlife crisis type thing. I always wanted one of those Thai tattoos where they manually tap tap tap the design into your skin with a mallet.

asabla• 2 years ago

It's never too late. It took me almost 18years of going back and forth until I did it.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

Why would you concern yourself with someone's perception of your motive for getting a tat?

izzydata• 2 years ago

This is the first time I've ever heard of someone regretting not getting a tattoo.

kirubakaran• 2 years ago

Some people even regret not having anything to regret

neom2• 2 years ago

The quantum (those dots and lines) part of my tattoo is stick and poke: https://s.h4x.club/jkupYOrX

shafyy• 2 years ago

Go for it!

simmerup3• 2 years ago

Midlife is when everyone starts doing cool stuff because theyve built up the income to service it

Do whatever you like, it’s your life

rrr_oh_man• 2 years ago

Yup.

John didn’t buy that classic car because he’s in a midlife crisis. He bought it because it’s been his dream car since he was 12, and, with the kids out of the house, he can finally get it without having a bad conscience. (It just costs $80k now instead of $8k back in 1972)

philipov• 2 years ago

Midlife is when everyone starts doing cool stuff because that's when the prefrontal cortex that inhibited you starts really breaking down.

polishdude20• 2 years ago

In a way, a midlife purchase is more smart financially than an early life purchase.

invalidusernam3• 2 years ago

Who cares if others think it's a midlife crisis, do what makes you happy. I'm nearing 40 and still get a couple tattoos a year. I love the feeling of a new tattoo, it boosts my confidence and gives me a sense of accomplishment for sitting through the fairly painful process.

prepend• 2 years ago

Exactly. Part of the fun of tattoos is everyone thinking you look stupid and being able to practice the stoicism of not caring what other people think and focusing on the intrinsic joy of doing what you want.

tmottabr• 2 years ago

Yeah.. Do it.. i just turned 40th this year and got my first tattoo last year..

Don't allow your life to be defined by what you imagine other people will think about it..

usrusr• 2 years ago

I've been jokingly predicting to myself for quite a while now that a tattoo fashion is imminent of studios offering deliberately blurred designs so that the result looks as if it was done before the design became cool.

petesergeant• 2 years ago

I started getting them at 37, and haven’t looked back. You’re more likely to get ones you like now you’re a bit older. I got a triceratops on my forearm last year because it’s my favourite dinosaur, and also why not?

graypegg• 2 years ago

I don't know why your comment appears to have been downvoted, I say go for it! "mid life crisis" is just a pessimistic way of saying "trying something new as an adult". If it makes you happy, and you're willing to accept some risk (which is a good thing!) then go get a tattoo.

Also, close to 50 is probably the new mid-life point anyway if you extend out the trajectory of health science thru the second half of your life. Chill out. :)

lopis• 2 years ago

Do it. Traditional thai tattoos look amazing and are much sharper. Who cares what others thing :)

otikik• 2 years ago

I'm almost out of my 40s and I definitely support you in doing whatever you like and not overthinking the midlife crisis thing.

That said, if I had the inkling (pun intended) to get a tattoo I would actually wait until this lymphoma association is verified, because if if it turns to be real, and then I get a lymphoma, I would feel very stupid. But then again, people smoke and do a lot of things that are objectively bad for their health. In short, I would not do it myself, but I would not judge you at all if you did.

zimpenfish• 2 years ago

If there is a link, I'd guess you're probably a lot safer getting tattooed at 50 than at 20 given you've (statistically) got much less time for any adverse effects to start showing up...

dgellow4• 2 years ago

The linked study looks extremely weak, not really something that should influence decision making yet

nox101• 2 years ago

You should do what you want.

That said, my friend with the most tattoos, basically every part of his body, arms, legs. Maybe his face and head don't have tattoos. When I told him I was thinking about getting one he told me "don't do it".

zolbrek2• 2 years ago

A heavily tattooed acquaintance told me the same thing when I was younger, and now that I've got several of my own I understand what he meant by it. He could tell my "thinking about getting one" was superficial, which is not a great starting point for getting inked. If you really want a tattoo you're going to get it regardless of any advice, so by telling me not to get one, he was trying to save me from what was (back then) potentially a bad decision.

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

Did you friend share a reason? For me, I love tattoos, but surely I would be tired of it in less than five years. Tough luck -- that shit is permanent. Plus, tats looks pretty awful on old people. I don't want to be that person.

walt_grata• 2 years ago

I got my first at 42, I've only ever gotten positive comments. Except from my buddy who is a tattoo artist, he was upset he didn't get to give me my first one.

failrate• 2 years ago

I had a similar issue, so I ended up getting a small abstract tattoo. Highly recommended.

yareal• 2 years ago

I'm 40, I got a sleeve done this year. I've never been more thrilled to get one. Get tattoos. It's your body, if the art is meaningful to you, why hold back?

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Do it. I’m early 40s, have several tattoos, and am about to get one wrist to shoulder. It’s never too late to do what you want in this regard.

Midlife crisis is a pejorative term for mortality perspective. Live your best life, you only get one, and what other people think matters very little (caveat being income source and partner(s)).

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

Have you seen the blurry mess a tattoo turns into 30 years later? You made a reasonable choice.

BobbyJo• 2 years ago

Have you seen the mess the human body turns into over the same time span?

mythrwy3• 2 years ago

Surprised at the number of people saying "just do it"!

For what it's worth I would never ink my body. Ever. I would sleep in the disposal hole of a porta potty first, that is how strongly I feel about it.

I have nothing against tattoos in general, many of my close friends have them. But I would never ever personally get one and can't imagine even considering it.

weakfish• 2 years ago

Why is that? Out of curiosity

dgellow4• 2 years ago

I’ve seen one being done on an ex-partner, the process is really interesting. Just take the mid-life crisis as an excuse to do it now, you will only get older and with more regrets

krisoft• 2 years ago

I feel like doing it now looks like a midlife crisis type thing.

It sounds like you care a lot about what others think. It is never too late to stop doing that.

I always wanted one of those Thai tattoos where they manually tap tap tap the design into your skin with a mallet.

Sounds absolute torture to me. But if you want that, hey, go for it. Never too late to decide for yourself what you want or don’t want.

iamacyborg2• 2 years ago

On the bright side, you presumably have more developed taste and a bigger budget than your average tattoo client which means you could go get something really good.

ko_pivot• 2 years ago

In the group with lymphoma, 21 percent were tattooed (289 individuals), while 18 percent were tattooed in the control group without a lymphoma diagnosis (735 individuals).

Sure, that’s a meaningful percentage difference, but with the relatively small sample size and different `n` values, I don’t make much of this at the moment.

noname120• 2 years ago

Base rate fallacy.

i_love_limes• 2 years ago

I suggest you read 'Study Size' under 'Methods'. Detecting an odds ratio of 1.3 with 80% power, and rounding way up to 3000 cases. To me that's not a small sample size, but definitely not the highest OR to aim for. Different cases vs. controls is not a problem for this study design. You pointing that out as a negative makes me think you might not know as much about epi study designs as your comment lets on

weberer• 2 years ago

Those look like sufficient sample sizes to me. How many samples would it take to convince you?

bogtog• 2 years ago

I looked up this journal, eClinicalMedicine, and it would be considered a pretty high-end medical one (impact factor = 15). However, this finding indeed seems like rubbish. The p-value for their central claim is p = .03. When bold claims come with these types of p-values, they generally don't replicate. I didn't look into what questionnaire the authors used, but they may have very well tried a bunch of correlations and this is what stuck.

It's surprising that this type of stuff can still get published in such high journals. This just makes me think that the field of medicine is failing to grapple with its replication issues. The social sciences get more heat for bad research, but I can't imagine that this type of stuff would fly today in a remotely comparable Psychology journal.

However, to be fair to the authors, those individual numbers you point out are the quantity with lymphoma and it would be more proper to say the sample sizes were n = 1398 for the tattoo group and n = 4193 for controls. There's also nothing really wrong with having unbalanced samples here. It's either be unbalanced or throw out control data... regardless, the barely significant p-value is the biggest concern. (If you're wondering how to judge a study's robustness, the easiest and generally most effective way is to just look at the p-values).

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

I'm curious what confounding factors might be at play.

I think tattoos have gotten more mainstream in recent decades, but I'd guess that before that it correlated with other risk factors [0].

[0] I'm not making any kind of oblique reference. I have no idea what those factors might be.

65a• 2 years ago

This was also my reaction almost immediately. Tattoos can have extensive correlation with social and lifestyle factors that could easily mean the difference between correlation and causation here.

noncoml4• 2 years ago

The hypothesis is that macrophages transport ink to the lymph nodes during the healing period

arisAlexis6• 2 years ago

Is there any proof that after healing there is nothing going on

wk_end• 2 years ago

The study itself [0] makes a stronger claim:

  When any antigen breaches the skin barrier, the local immunologic response
  includes cell-mediated translocation of the antigen to the local lymph nodes
  from where a systemic immune response is initiated. The translocation of tattoo
  ink seems to be very effective; it has been estimated that 32% of the injected
  pigment is translocated after 6 weeks, and that as much as 99% may become
  translocated over time.

  In clinical settings, pigmented and enlarged lymph nodes have been described in
  tattooed individuals for decades. Translocation of both black and coloured
  tattoo pigments to human lymph nodes has been confirmed, as have depositions of
  metal particles from tattoo needle wear.

That is - it's not just during the healing period, and that it's been confirmed rather than a hypothesis.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...

ajb• 2 years ago

Hmm. Cats are subject to a cancer at injection sites (Feline Injection Site Sarcoma) but thats not a lymphoma so I guess not related.

ambyra• 2 years ago

I remember hearing somewhere that cells keep absorbing the ink, die, then release the ink in a cycle as an explanation to why the tattoos blur over time. If the ink immersed cells are forced to die and regrow at a faster rate than surrounding cells, there is a higher risk of mutations?

simmerup3• 2 years ago

Kurzgesagt did a video on how tattoo ink is locked in place by the immune system

https://youtu.be/nGggU-Cxhv0?si=0DZipl87lE3oDMYR

AceyMan• 2 years ago

I'm beginning to think the new slogan ought to be, "There's a Kurzgesagt for that..." (vice, xkcd).

tamimio• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39542192

Tattoos indeed are known to cause cancer among other health complications.

aeturnum3• 2 years ago

Your linked evidence doesn't support what you say. There are plenty of examples of concerning ingredients turning up in tattoo inks (a recent study found many inks have unlisted and potentially harmful chemicals[1]). This is obviously not good, but it falls far short of "causing" anything in particular. It's similar to all the warnings in CA about "chemicals known to cause cancer" - unless you would also say something like "putting gas in your car is known to cause cancer." Tattoos are not known to cause cancer and the articles you link don't claim they are.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39542567

arisAlexis6• 2 years ago

Injecting yourself with something that has proven cancer causing chemicals cannot be harmless if course

blinkingled3• 2 years ago

Hair dyes would have similar absorption mechanism right?

throw383y8• 2 years ago

No, I believe cancer from hair dyes was caused by touching dye during application. Poisons are volatile, dye is only toxic, while it is drying.

Tattoo pigment particles are quite inert.

foobiekr• 2 years ago

How do you know they are inert? The ingredients are mostly unstudied and unregulated.

chickenbig• 2 years ago

Tattoo pigment particles are quite inert.

Asbestos is quite inert, which is a good property for fire retardant materials to have. However it does have an unfortunate effect when inhaled.

GuB-422• 2 years ago

Hair is dead, skin is not. Your body doesn't care about what you do to your hair, you can cut it, dye it, anything as long as it doesn't touch the root. Tattoos are about injecting a foreign substance in live tissue, which triggers an immune response, and that's what the article is about. There is a reason tattoos hurt and haircuts don't.

blinkingled3• 2 years ago

Well sure, but the scalp underneath the hair that's gotta have some skin properties - sure it's thicker than the rest of the skin and has some protective properties against some forms of environmental damage but the dye does go in there and years of use should cause _some_ thing - not sure there's any research around what exactly.

DataDive• 2 years ago

The problem with these studies is that it is exceedingly difficult to correctly account for all the additional differences between people who do get tattoos and those who don't.

Plus, if you don't find an effect, there is no paper to publish.

So, the proper correction factor is not just to account for the data in this study; scientists would also need to implicitly correct for all the other (unpublished) attempts by other scientists that found no effect.

It's a tricky business for sure and not one with a reasonable solution.

Hence I would not read too much into this study ...

lachaux• 2 years ago

The problem with these studies is that it is exceedingly difficult to correctly account for all the additional differences between people who do get tattoos and those who don't.

I don't disagree to the gist of your post. However, in biomedical and public health research, papers are published even "if you don't find an effect", for good reasons. There could be simply very many unknown factors at the initial phase of some research topics. Researchers find or notice some things, publish them with rigorous discussions, proposed hypothesis with explicitly mentioned assumptions, etc. Other researchers build upon the existing results, add more discoveries, which can be proving or disproving, partially or wholly, etc. It often takes years of multiple teams to get a good enough understanding of a topic. This implicit collaboration is a positive feedback loop to advance the research.

The issue is that the vast majority don't read the detailed discussion in the papers and thus could get a partial thesis, which in many cases lead to incorrect conclusions. Media reports don't help, because they are essentially a simplified version. Otherwise, they can simply refers to the original papers and ask the audience to read them. Also, not many reporters have solid scientific training in the fields they report and don't understand the papers well enough. I don't blame them, since it is hardly their job. Good readers must be aware that the reports can be misleading, or biased, or simply wrong.

edit: grammar

ssijak• 2 years ago

I would be surprised if injecting foreign material that stays almost permanently and is released slowly to the rest of the system does not influence the system in some way. Is it cancer, I don't know close enough to say, but I would be surprise if it does nothing.

dmitrysergeyev2• 2 years ago

It would be nice if the study checked whether the higher amount of individuals in the cancer group got their tattoos AFTER they got diagnosed. This may be the case if people are more open to take risky actions following such diagnoses. It would explain why the size of the tattoo didn’t correlate with change of getting cancer. Such conclusion will ultimately disprove the causation.

dmitrysergeyev2• 2 years ago

chance*

meindnoch• 2 years ago

Injecting foreign particles into your body, which stay there forever, continuously irritating it?

Hmmm... I don't see how this could be harmful!

romseb• 2 years ago

Genetic predispositions, obesity and a lot of other factors also play a role in the risk of developing lymphoma.

From the article: "we found that the risk of developing lymphoma was 21 percent higher among those who were tattooed"

Let's put this number into context, because "percent of increased risk" is always something I struggle to picture"

"Overall, the chance that a man will develop NHL in his lifetime is about 1 in 42; for a woman, the risk is about 1 in 52." [1]

So the overall risk is ~2 %. That means getting a tattoo will bring your overall risk of developing NHL from 2 % to 2.5 % instead.

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/non-hodgkin-lymphoma/abo...

arisAlexis6• 2 years ago

It's still important if there is a connection

dgellow4• 2 years ago

The study doesn’t say there is a connection though. Just that there may be some correlation

juujian• 2 years ago

That's 0.5 percentage points. Would be nice to get that metric, too, alongside percentages sometimes. Here the initial likelihood is relatively high, when the likelihood is low, percentage increases can be very misleading. Particularly if the uncertainty around the increase is high.

robocat• 2 years ago

NHL

  Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is a cancer that starts in lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell that helps fight infection. Lymphocytes are found in the bloodstream but also in the lymph system and throughout the body.

helsinkiandrew• 2 years ago

I doubt if they’ve completely eliminated social factors. Apparently people with tattoos “have higher levels of need for uniqueness, sensation seeking, and thrill and adventure seeking, but they have lower levels of self-esteem, attend religious services less, and are generally much less educated than individuals who did not have tattoos.”

https://www.jyi.org/2016-april/2017/3/12/got-ink-an-analysis...

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

The last one bothers me the most:

    > generally much less educated than individuals who did not have tattoos

To me, this seems obviously about social/economic class. If you work a good paying job, then you are much less likely to have tattoos, primarily because your co-workers do not have them. Before every HN commenters jumps on me, think about all the office worker normies out there, working normie office jobs, the pressure to conform is much higher than bro-grammers who are allowed to go work in jeans and hoodie. From my experience, the (middle/senior) manager types (including lawyers) are the least likely to have tattoos.

bdjsiqoocwk2• 2 years ago

Brogrammers also tend not to have tattoos

skadamou• 2 years ago

"We found no evidence of increasing risk with a larger area of total tattooed body surface."

Without a dose response, I'm inclined to believe that the increase in lymphoma seen in people with tattoos has more to do with confounding factors than with the ink or the act of getting a needle poked into your skin. I would think that controlling for all confounders in a study like this would be exceptionally difficult.

That said, I'm pretty sure that at least some inks do contain known carcinogens[1]

[1]https://tattoo.iarc.who.int/background/

tgv• 2 years ago

Even a correlation with the amount of ink could be a lifestyle confound. I'm pretty sure that the population that has a small tattoo differs from the one with large parts covered. Indeed, it is hard to find a cause.

timr• 2 years ago

Yes. Also, the survey response rate was the biggest difference between groups (54% vs 47%), which could easily explain the observed differences. The confidence intervals cross 1.0 for nearly all reported IRR values.

For those who don't know how to interpret medical evidence, this study is very weak.

usgroup2• 2 years ago

Those response rates are fairly awful with two groups that are markedly different. Seems very likely that they’d self-select on the face of it especially if they knew what the research question was.

office_drone• 2 years ago

Indeed. It's not the ink content that led to Am J Clin Pathol. 2014;142(1):99-103. saying:

"The mean age of death for tattooed persons was 39 years, compared with 53 years for non-tattooed persons (P = .0001). There was a significant contribution of negative messages in tattoos associated with non-natural death (P = .0088) but not with natural death."

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure "people with negative msgs in tattoos died 14 years earlier" sheds light for me on the TFA.

TFA has a more direct, physical, concern - it starts from a well-known, that tattoo ink ends up in lymph nodes, and it does a statistical analysis showing there's a significant statistical result in lymphoma occurence.

I think people with negative tattoos dying younger reduces the # of people with tattoos who get lymphoma, as they have less ink-in-lymph-nodes years.

usgroup2• 2 years ago

Yeah totally agree. That the size of the tattoo or the number of them not increasing risk makes no sense. Somewhat like claiming whether you smoke a cigarette or 20 a day, the risk is the same. If the latter was true it would more likely indicate that there is some other commonality in that group increasing the risk.

Also the slicing and dicing, “11 more than the index year” and so on, is multiple hypothesis testing on the face of it; I wonder if they adjust for that.

gwern2• 2 years ago

This is a Swedish study, so what might be possible is using the population registry to contact siblings of the cancer patients to ask about traits like tattooing and then their health data would already be in Swedish system and linkable. This would control for a lot of the relevant confounders.

tempestn2• 2 years ago

Though not those related to people's choice to get tattoos.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

Tattoos basically shift your immune system into overdrive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGggU-Cxhv0

gumby4• 2 years ago

I’m not surprised — tattoo inks are not regulated and the colors are often formed with toxic compounds (e.g. copper). Then the needle avoids the protective barrier provided by the skin.

Ironically, while working on a drug program that involved intradermal injection, we needed to tattoo the injection site so we could find it later. The FDA was very demanding that both the procedure and more importantly to them the dye would not have any effect that might alter the body’s response to the compound under test. We had to do a whole study just to validate this.

So the FDA is concerned about this issue for guinea pigs, but is barred from investigating the effect on humans. All they can do is publish advice on their web site.

boppo1• 2 years ago

barred from investigating the effect on humans

Wait they're legally prevented from investigating tattoo inks? Why?

voxic113• 2 years ago

Tattoo ink is not a food or a drug and is not intended to treat or diagnose any disease or medical condition.

gumby4• 2 years ago

Congress only authorizes executive branch agencies to have responsibility for certain things, and tattoos are not within scope, not being a medical treatment of any sort.

BTW FDA was explicitly barred by a corrupt law* from regulating anything "natural" (a poorly defined criterion) so the same happens with all those things you see in Whole Foods: FDA can warn you of certain dangers from their web site but that's it.

They have a summary page that talks about the history of law that apply to them: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history/milestones-us-food...

* Herbalife got their senator, Orrin Hatch, to get this law passed so they would stop getting in trouble for peddling snake oil in both their products and their MLM business model. His career was basically 100% carrying water for MLM folks and the music industry in exchange for cash.

burkaman2• 2 years ago

I don't think this is true. According to the FDA's site they could regulate tattoo inks but have chosen not to.

FDA considers the inks used in intradermal tattoos, including permanent makeup, to be cosmetics. When we identify a safety problem associated with a cosmetic, including a tattoo ink, we investigate and take action, as appropriate, to prevent consumer illness or injury. The pigments used in the inks are color additives, which are subject to premarket approval under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. However, because of other competing public health priorities and a previous lack of evidence of safety problems specifically associated with these pigments, FDA traditionally has not exercised regulatory authority for color additives on the pigments used in tattoo inks. The actual practice of tattooing is regulated by local jurisdictions.

- https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetic-products/tattoos-perm...

Galatians4_162• 2 years ago

Isn't the FDA the same agency that authorized the use of Thalidomide for pregnant women, and then much later deauthorized it due to birth defects?

zolbrek2• 2 years ago

Tattoo inks are regulated in the EU, my tattoo artist wasn't happy about the regulations when they were first announced a few years ago.

lostlogin2• 2 years ago

Some of the regulated ones still cause issues.

Had one that was used to give someone eyebrows that got all toasty in an MR scanner.

m4633• 2 years ago

sounds like lots of regulations. Stuff gets worse to get better.

rohs solder. Leaded paints, enamel paints, water based paints. cars with smog pumps and catalytic converters.

stevenwoo• 2 years ago

Can you reveal what was safe to use as a tattoo ink?

h05sz487b• 2 years ago

Please don‘t tattoo your guinea pig.

bardworx2• 2 years ago

Technically? Nothing.

But, as with anything, it’s about nuance. You can read through the ingredients here[0] and tell me what you’d like in your body.

The earliest tattoos, from my understanding, were done by incision and rubbing carbon into the wound. Regardless if you use old or new inks/techniques, it’s not really cut and dry to say “this is bad/good” because the size of the particulates matter. For a tattoo shop that uses high quality ink, and is diligent in its sterilization, most inks are fine. The large molecules are “trapped” by your immune system to just stay there[1], making them not dangerous.

There is a ton of research on PubMed about tattoos, most being negative. However, I suspect it’s because the authors had a predisposition to be negative from the start based on how the research is conducted and what they focus on. But I could be wrong and you should make up your own mind.

Bottom line: if you get tattoos, pay the premium and go to a good shop. The hygiene and good products are worth it, if that’s your thing.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9846827/#:~:tex....

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29511065/

gumby4• 2 years ago

We ended up using India ink, which (according to the encyclopedia of ink* ) is mainly soot.

We were able to isolate it in the HPLC and through some histopath experiments show that it didn’t have any negative local effect between (IIRC) seven and 60 days. Why those times? Protocol was to tattoo on day 0, wait a week for the site to recover, then inject our experimental material on day 7, sacrificing subject animals at D14 (one week), 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and 56 days.

I don’t think lamp black is really a good idea, but was adequate for our purposes. We didn’t have to do any kind of long term study, just demonstrate that it would not interfere with our work in guinea pigs.

* I actually went to a specialist art store and the owner did indeed go to the back of the store and pull out one of the volumes of a multi-volume work on inks and pigments! I don’t know if it was actually named “The Encyclopedia of Ink”, though I do remember that that’s how he referred to it. He just photocopied the relevant page for me, most of which was the entry for India ink.

pyuser583• 2 years ago

The best X-Files episode, "Never Again" from Season 4, is about toxic chemicals in tattoos.

Terr_• 2 years ago

I suppose that's technically true, although the toxicity is implied to be more interpersonal than chemical. :p

HideousKojima• 2 years ago

The best X-Files episode

I believe you meant "Folie a Deux"?

roughly• 2 years ago

A hypothesis that Christel Nielsen's research group had before the study was that the size of the tattoo would affect the lymphoma risk. They thought that a full body tattoo might be associated with a greater risk of cancer compared to a small butterfly on the shoulder, for example. Unexpectedly, the area of tattooed body surface turned out not to matter.

As someone pointed out on the other thread about this[1], the lack of dose response makes it very difficult to see this as a direct correlation and not reflective of other confounding factors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492364

trifurcate• 2 years ago

Why so? Zero-order effects are not unheard of in biology. Example: the elimination rate of ethyl alcohol is dose-independent because any practically noticeable concentration of ethyl alcohol will saturate available alcohol dehydrogenases.

draxter• 2 years ago

Perhaps this has something to do it?

https://chpgroup.com/evidence-in-ih/tattoo-ink-can-mimic-lym...

voisin• 2 years ago

I’d be interested to know degree of tattooing. Some people get a small butterfly or whatever and other people get full sleeves. Did they take this into account or was in binary tattooed or not?

noncoml4• 2 years ago

The size didn’t seem to make a difference

zeehio• 2 years ago

I would believe those results if they had published the methods (including everything they were correcting for, etc) BEFORE starting the data collection.

Otherwise I can argue that once you have all the data it is feasible to test many different combinations of variable corrections, age groupings, tattoo sizes, etc. until you find one scenario (the one you publish) with "statistical significance".

I had a quick glance at the article and the authors do not discuss any multiple testing correction method. The lack of such discussion makes me think that they were unaware of such problem and they tested multiple hypothesis until they found one "statistically significant". This is called cherry picking. https://xkcd.com/882/

I can think of two alternatives to the cherry picking hypothesis that might make me believe their conclusion will hold:

1. They had the statistical analysis plan decided from the beginning up to the smallest detail. They followed it by the book and they found the published result without exploring anything else, so there were no other hypothesis to correct for multiple testing for. This is feasible, but seeing the significance and effect size it seems this would be a very risky study design, since the effect size they see is rather small. Since it's so risky, I find it unlikely.

2. The result holds regardless of forcing minor variations to all those corrections. This means there would probably exist a simpler analysis plan, without so many corrections, that presents compatible results with the published plan. This is unlikely in my opinion, because if that were the case I would expect a simpler story in the paper, or a larger effect size.

Maybe an independent group of researchers believes in these results and decides to reproduce the study to confirm it. If this happens I hope they follow the same statistical analysis plan published in this paper, and I hope they can publish their findings in the same journal, even if they can't get a "statistical significance".

unsupp0rted2• 2 years ago

Semi-permanent "makeup" is popular too, which is tattoo'd-on makeup effects.

I'd be amazed if it didn't have health effects.

nikolay6• 2 years ago

Vanity is a sin, and sin corrupts the body.

taejavu• 2 years ago

In this case I think it's probably the toxic chemicals that is corrupting our bodies.

nikolay6• 2 years ago

Yeah, toxic chemicals injected due to sin; it's sin the the root cause!

cdme2• 2 years ago

Thanks mom

nikolay6• 2 years ago

Sleep tight!

fred_is_fred• 2 years ago

So why isn’t the sky wizard giving people who wear makeup cancer?

nikolay6• 2 years ago

Many of the cosmetic products have known carcinogens in them and, I guess, many unknown ones as well.

dgellow4• 2 years ago

Another reason to get tattooed

nikolay6• 2 years ago

I don't mind - you body does!

svnt• 2 years ago

“There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?”

nikolay6• 2 years ago

Actually, there's a vast difference between exposing sin and judging. Was John the Baptist judging Herod?

datavirtue2• 2 years ago

The truely funny posts always get down voted.

prmph• 2 years ago

So would scalp micro pigmentation also be dangerous?

iamacyborg2• 2 years ago

If it’s done with a blade like eyebrows are then the ink likely doesn’t penetrate as deep as a tattoo.

cdme2• 2 years ago

I’m working on filling out my arm and then on to some other ideas next. Suppose we’ll see.

DoreenMichele• 2 years ago

“We have identified people diagnosed with lymphoma via population registers. These individuals were then matched with a control group of the same sex and age, but without lymphoma. The study participants answered a questionnaire about lifestyle factors to determine whether they were tattooed or not”

Not at all what I expected. Color me impressed with the methodology.

drojas• 2 years ago

I wonder if laser tattoo removal adds to or decreases the potential risk. On one hand it gets rid of the ink but on the other hand it does so by releasing it into the system for a short period.

b800h• 2 years ago

Are people with tattoos more likely to smoke, drink and take drugs?

moi23883• 2 years ago

Unexpectedly, the area of tattooed body surface turned out not to matter.

I’m calling bullshit.

pjerem• 2 years ago

Alcohol can cause cancer to your butt although you (probably) drink it with your mouth. It turns out human body is pretty good at moving compounds everywhere. That’s even how oral medication works.

moi23883• 2 years ago

Which is still correlated with the amount of alcohol consumed, no?

Please name a toxin that is not dependent on dosage. I claim this is then not a toxin.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Interesting how there's not too many studies out there, despite the increasing popularity of tattoos.

bdjsiqoocwk2• 2 years ago

Whaaaa? Putting things into your skin is bad? Impossible??!

animanoir• 2 years ago

I thought it was common sense. Also, *not* having tattoos is way cooler nowadays.

mbonnet• 2 years ago

Since dosage seems to not have been addressed, my sleeve work shall continue unabated.

Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma

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