- Tattoo ink contains known carcinogens and can be carried throughout the body and end up in lymph nodes.
- However, there is little research on whether or not having a tattoo increases the risk of cancer.
- Researchers at Lund University in Sweden used national registries to identify cases of lymphoma and analyze whether they could be linked to tattoos.
- They found a 21% increased risk of lymphoma in people with tattoos compared to those without tattoos.
- Researchers are now studying whether tattoos can increase the risk of different types of cancer.
Tattoos were associated with a 21% increased risk of lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in an observational study of a Swedish cohort.
Researchers from Lund University, Sweden, analyzed the Swedish National Cancer Registry and found that tattoo size had little effect on cancer risk. The results are published in Electronic medicine.
While researchers were already aware of the potentially carcinogenic properties of some tattoo inks, the authors of this study said their impact on cancer risk was not, prompting them to undertake the current research.
First author Christel Nielsen, PhD, associate professor at Lund University, Sweden, told Medical news today:
“The chemical content of tattoo ink has received a lot of attention over the past decade, particularly in Europe. Tattoo ink often contains chemicals known to cause cancer in other settings, such as in occupationally exposed workers. We also know that ink is flushed out of the skin by the immune system, as the body attempts to eliminate ink particles that it perceives as something foreign that shouldn’t be there. This process has been shown to move the pigment to the lymph nodes and is stored there permanently.
“We wanted to connect the dots and understand how our health is affected by the permanent storage of potentially toxic chemicals within the immune system,” she told us.
The researchers identified cases of lymphoma in the Swedish National Cancer Registry, a centralized database of cancer cases in the country. To include people most likely to have a tattoo, they limited the ages of patients they wanted to identify to between 20 and 60, when they were diagnosed with lymphoma, between 2007 and 2017.
They then contacted affected people and controls – three per affected person – to ask them to participate in the study, and resulted in a study group of 1,398 people with lymphoma and 4,193 people without lymphoma.
They found that 21% of people with lymphoma had a tattoo and 18% of those without lymphoma had a tattoo.
The risk was 81% higher for people with tattoos than for people without tattoos, within 2 years of getting a tattoo, the researchers found. This risk decreased between 3 and 10 years after tattooing, then increased to a 19% higher risk after 11 years.
Overall, tattooed participants had a 21% higher risk of lymphoma than controls. The size of the tattoo has no impact on the risk of lymphoma.
The two lymphomas that people with tattoos had the highest risk of developing compared to those without tattoos were diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and follicular lymphoma.
The authors of the current study did not investigate why the increased risk was due to tattooing, although they adjusted their analysis for potentially confounding factors, such as education level, income, smoking or l marital status, to minimize the potential effect of socioeconomic status and lifestyle on the results.
MNT asked Wael Harb, MD, a board-certified hematologist and medical oncologist at MemorialCare Cancer Institute at Orange Coast and Saddleback Medical Centers in Orange County, Calif., who was not involved in this research, whether the differences observed between people with and without tattoos could, actually. , be due to lifestyle factors.
According to him:
“The study adjusted its analysis for several lifestyle factors, including smoking and socioeconomic status. Although tattoos themselves have been shown to be a risk factor for lymphoma, lifestyle factors associated with people who get tattoos (e.g., smoking, substance use) could also contribute to a increased risk.
Harb cautioned that ”
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