United States: Recent research associated with Swedes revealed that people who had tattoos were 21 percent more likely to have malignant lymphoma later on.
The risk also did not get higher or lower when the body tattoo design was small compared to when it was big, as revealed in the study by the journal eClinicalMedicine.
More about Lymphoma
Lymphoma is a type of cancerous cell, and the tissues that compose the lymphatic system are known to exhibit increased rates of growth.
Forbes explained that the lymphatic system is also your body immune action that protects you against germs as well as diseases and resembles a Roomba-sewer-security system.
This system includes a number of body parts that you may not think about every day: your spleen, your thymus, your tonsils, your bone marrow, and the system of the communicating vessels and glands in your belly, your hips or your loins, your lower stomach or your stomach, your arms, and your throat.
Various forms of lymphoma can occur in any part of this system and fall under two main subcategories: Two types of lymphoma that are well known and distinguishable from each other are Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
More about the recent study
For the study that was done in 2021, three researchers from Lund University in Lund, Sweden (Christel Nielsen, Mats Jerkeman, and Anna Saxne Jöud) first identified, utilizing the Swedish National Cancer Register, all those 20 years of age and below and up, to 60 years diagnosed with malignant lymphoma between 2007 and 2017.
To this end, for each of the identified lymphoma cases, the investigators employed the Total Population Register to come up with three or more controls who were randomly selected to match the age and sex of the cases. This brought the overall study population to 11,905 people, as the initial assessment.
After such, they pose these questions to each of these people by administering a self-developed questionnaire on tattoo-related questions which included whether the person had any tattoo, when he/she made the decision, and the size of the tattoos. Of these, 54 percent (1,398) from the first group, or the intervention group, and 47 percent (4,193) from the second group, or the control group, completed the questionnaire.
They found out that more of the cases actually had gotten a tattoo than the controls, although the difference in percentage was small (21 percent and 18 percent).
Those individuals who were tattooed were 21 percent more likely to have the disease related to lymphoma. The highest relative risks were recorded for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and follicular lymphoma, with the former featuring a 30 percent higher risk and the latter having a 29 percent increased risk.
The probability was highest soon after a person had gotten the tattoo: 2 years after – it was 81 percent higher for people with a tattoo compared to those who didn’t; the probability was lower in the middle of the 3-10 years afterward; and then was higher again 11 years after – a 19 percent increase among people with a tattoo.