[HN Gopher] Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma
___________________________________________________________________
Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma
Author : belter
Score : 128 points
Date : 2024-05-27 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lunduniversity.lu.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lunduniversity.lu.se)
| plasma_beam wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's never too late. It took me almost 18years of going back
| and forth until I did it.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Why would you concern yourself with someone's perception of
| your motive for getting a tat?
| izzydata wrote:
| This is the first time I've ever heard of someone regretting
| not getting a tattoo.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Some people even regret not having anything to regret
| neom wrote:
| The quantum (those dots and lines) part of my tattoo is stick
| and poke: https://s.h4x.club/jkupYOrX
| shafyy wrote:
| Go for it!
| simmerup wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| JusticeJuice wrote:
| Unrelated, but one of the most interesting graphs I've ever
| seen was road deaths, by gender and age, when I was
| studying for my drivers license.
|
| There's a huge, like 10x spike in male deaths, specifically
| at 50. Turns out a lot of people hit that age, think "oh
| fuck I'm 50", go and buy a really powerful car, and get in
| a bad crash.
|
| So buy the car, but just keep the graph in mind haha.
| nprateem wrote:
| Yeah same with motorbikes. Someone had a 125 when they
| were 16, hit 50 and decide to get a 1200cc superbike,
| then come off.
| ip26 wrote:
| Three other problem is they haven't ridden for 34 years,
| but feel like they are just as skilled as they ever were.
| philipov wrote:
| Midlife is when everyone starts doing cool stuff because
| that's when the prefrontal cortex that inhibited you starts
| really breaking down.
| simmerup wrote:
| Fun by any other name would still be fun
| polishdude20 wrote:
| In a way, a midlife purchase is more smart financially than
| an early life purchase.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I can do that without getting a tattoo though.
| tmottabr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do it. Traditional thai tattoos look amazing and are much
| sharper. Who cares what others thing :)
| otikik wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I don't know if I'd conclude it. What about the possibility
| of that the tattoo association is only at higher ages,
| because of some effect where younger people have a better
| immune system to ward off any immediate dangers of the
| tattoo ink and then it becomes inert. But getting it at 50,
| your body is less able to dispel the problematic compounds
| in the ink. Basically saying the ink's problems could just
| be front-loaded the first couple years. Without
| understanding those details (risk associated with _when_
| the tattoo was received and short-term vs. long term risk),
| I 'd be wary about deciding 50 is safer than 20.
| nox101 wrote:
| 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".
| zolbrek wrote:
| 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.
| walt_grata wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I had a similar issue, so I ended up getting a small abstract
| tattoo. Highly recommended.
| yareal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Have you seen the blurry mess a tattoo turns into 30 years
| later? You made a reasonable choice.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Have you seen the mess the human body turns into over the
| same time span?
| mythrwy wrote:
| 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.
| ko_pivot wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Base rate fallacy.
| i_love_limes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Those look like sufficient sample sizes to me. How many samples
| would it take to convince you?
| bogtog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| noncoml wrote:
| The hypothesis is that macrophages transport ink to the lymph
| nodes during the healing period
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Is there any proof that after healing there is nothing going
| on
| wk_end wrote:
| 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/S258953
| 702...
| ajb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| simmerup wrote:
| Kurzgesagt did a video on how tattoo ink is locked in place by
| the immune system
|
| https://youtu.be/nGggU-Cxhv0?si=0DZipl87lE3oDMYR
| tamimio wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39542192
|
| Tattoos indeed are known to cause cancer among other health
| complications.
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Injecting yourself with something that has proven cancer
| causing chemicals cannot be harmless if course
| aeturnum wrote:
| It certainly can - I think artificial sweeteners are great
| examples. There are experimental studies that show that
| artificial sweeteners can cause cancer in animal studies,
| but as of yet there's no clear evidence of that showing up
| for any definable population in the real world[1].
|
| Chemicals linked to cancer (or other conditions) are cause
| for concern! It's important to note & track these things.
| But the dose makes the poison and it's totally possible to
| inject a chemical that 100% causes cancer (under some
| circumstances) with no adverse impacts.
|
| [1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-
| prevention/risk/d...
| arisAlexis wrote:
| You are talking about non cancer causing chemicals to
| humans. The definition of a cancer causing chemicals is
| it will cause cancer. If it's a small dose it will not be
| easily detectable that doesn't mean it doesn't cause
| harm.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Hair dyes would have similar absorption mechanism right?
| throw383y8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How do you know they are inert? The ingredients are mostly
| unstudied and unregulated.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| If they weren't (mostly) inert, I guess they would do a
| poor job at staying in place, which is the whole point of
| tattoos.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| blinkingled wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dmitrysergeyev wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Injecting foreign particles into your body, which stay there
| forever, continuously irritating it?
|
| Hmmm... I don't see how this could be harmful!
| romseb wrote:
| 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...
| arisAlexis wrote:
| It's still important if there is a connection
| juujian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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...
| skadamou wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| usgroup wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It shows the existence of some very strong confounding
| mechanisms.
| refulgentis wrote:
| There's certainly plenty of those! :)
|
| I doubt they intended to communicate something that
| general, and if they did, I doubt they meant to pick one
| that would reinforce the conclusion.
| usgroup wrote:
| 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.
| gwern wrote:
| 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.
| tempestn wrote:
| Though not those related to people's choice to get tattoos.
| gumby wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > barred from investigating the effect on humans
|
| Wait they're legally prevented from investigating tattoo inks?
| Why?
| voxic11 wrote:
| Tattoo ink is not a food or a drug and is not intended to
| treat or diagnose any disease or medical condition.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Whereas in South Korea only licensed medical professionals
| are allowed to open tattoo parlors:
|
| > The Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare considers the
| act of tattooing similar to medical procedures and deemed
| they should therefore only be performed by a professional
| with a medical license.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattooing_in_South_Korea
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I mean, I'm glad that's not the case
| mythrwy wrote:
| Given the awful nature of doctors handwriting?
| boringg wrote:
| It seems quite contrary to the current tattoo vibe if you
| had to get it by a doctor.
| voxic11 wrote:
| The FDA is not empowered to regulate medical procedures.
| Those are regulated by state laws and agencies. So even
| if tattooing was considered a medical procedure the FDA
| would not be able to regulate them.
| neom wrote:
| https://theworld.org/stories/2019/10/24/south-koreas-
| imperil... good read. I live in Korea and have had a lot
| of my tats done here, people seem to not care much about
| the tattoo shops, at least the artists I'm friends with
| said they have no fear of prosecution.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| zolbrek wrote:
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Can you reveal what was safe to use as a tattoo ink?
| h05sz487b wrote:
| Please don't tattoo your guinea pig.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| The best X-Files episode, "Never Again" from Season 4, is about
| toxic chemicals in tattoos.
| roughly wrote:
| > 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
| draxter wrote:
| Perhaps this has something to do it?
|
| https://chpgroup.com/evidence-in-ih/tattoo-ink-can-mimic-lym...
| voisin wrote:
| 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?
| zeehio wrote:
| 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".
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Semi-permanent "makeup" is popular too, which is tattoo'd-on
| makeup effects.
|
| I'd be amazed if it _didn 't_ have health effects.
| nikolay wrote:
| Vanity is a sin, and sin corrupts our body.
| taejavu wrote:
| In this case I think it's probably the toxic chemicals that is
| corrupting our bodies.
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