Could tattoos increase risk of lymphoma?

CANCER DIGEST – June 16, 2024 – A new Swedish study has found that tattoos could be a risk factor for lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. The results of the study appear in the June 2024 journal eClinical Medicine.

"After taking into account other relevant factors, such as smoking and age, we found that the risk of developing lymphoma was 21 percent higher among those who were tattooed" Christel Nielsen the researcher at Lund University who led the study said in a press release. "It is important to remember that lymphoma is a rare disease and that our results apply at the group level. The results now need to be verified and investigated further in other studies and such research is ongoing."

The population study involved 11,905 people, 2,938 of whom had lymphoma between the ages of 20 and 60 years old. Of those, 1,398 lymphoma survivors answered a standardized questionnaire about lifestyle and other factors. Another group of 4,193 people without lymphoma also answered the questionnaire.

The results showed that 21 percent (289) of the lymphoma group had tattoos, while 18 percent of (735) of the non-lymphoma group had tattoos. After taking into account all the factors the researchers calculated that those with tattoos had a 21 percent higher risk of lymphoma.

What the biological link might be is not known, however the researchers’ hypothesis was that people with full body tattoos might be at greater risk of cancer compared to people with a small butterfly tattoo, for example, on the shoulder. Surprisingly that turned out not be the case. The amount of surface area covered by tattoos did not seem to matter.

“We do not yet know why this was the case," Nielsen said. "One can only speculate that a tattoo, regardless of size, triggers a low-grade inflammation in the body, which in turn can trigger cancer. The picture is thus more complex than we initially thought.”  

The biological mechanism is thought to be that tattoo ink injected into the body is interpreted by the immune system as a foreign invader, which triggers the immune system to attack the ink and carry it to the lymph nodes, where white blood cells fight the infection.

The investigators note that very little research has been done on the long term effects of tattoos, so much more work needs to be done before there is any conclusive evidence of a link between tattoos and cancer.

Source: Lund University press release