The researchers discovered that once a tattoo is made, the ink rapidly travels through the lymphatic system and, within hours, accumulates in large quantities in the lymph nodes — key organs of the body’s defense system. Inside these nodes, immune cells called macrophages actively capture all types of pigment. This ink uptake triggers an inflammatory response with two phases: an acute phase lasting about two days after tattooing, followed by a chronic phase that can persist for years. The chronic phase is particularly concerning because it weakens the immune system, potentially increasing the susceptibility to infections and cancer. The study also showed that macrophages cannot break down the ink like they would other pathogens, wich causes them to die, especially with red and black inks, suggesting these colors may be more toxic. As a result, ink remains trapped in the lymph nodes in a continuous cycle of capture and cell death, gradually affecting the immune system’s defensive capacity.
The study found that tattooed mice produced significantly lower levels of antibodies after vaccination. This effect is likely due to the impaired function of immune cells that remain associated with tattoo ink for long periods. Similarly, human immune cells previously exposed to ink also showed a weakened response to vaccination.
The full paper is here and, as usual, it’s hardly anything and decontextualized in order to get a publishable result.
This one is so bad that it doesn’t use established baselines or do any form of statistical analysis on the results instead opting for their own “baseline” measurements using very small sample sizes. It also plays a smoke and mirrors game where it shows a result for short term immunological response and then uses that to insinuate the ‘slightly reduced but still likely well within the error of the poor control’ long term effects are worth noting.
Other major flaws:
- As others have mentioned, mice are a terrible model for this as their skin is very thin and proper tattooing is near impossible.
- They mention verifying with human cadavers but don’t include any data from those.
- There was no control group, the baseline was an untreated mouse, not one with an acute foot trauma.
- Mice age very quickly, best I can tell the immunological markers weren’t age controlled. 2 months out of a <2 year lifespan is a lot of aging. Again, if there was a proper control to measure against.
- The obsfucation of the raw data into cheesy and unreadable box and whisker plots is hella suspicious.
At best it’s a very poorly communicated and poorly designed experiment but I suspect that’s due to it result hunting.
What the hell? Was this even peer reviewed?
Oh honey… This is barely below average.
Probably by LLMs.
Surely someone could check this by doing a statistical analysis of cancer patients with tattoos vs how many of the general population has tattoos?
i wonder where the cross-examination of deaths of tattooed people compared to non-tattooed people are
surely those are made
and we can just check causes of death checking out with immune system issues
how low? weakened by how much?
I think they leave that out on purpose so they can make these sensational claims… if your immune system takes a 0.02% hit, nobody would care
You’d care if it’s a 20% hit, though.
But you’re completely right, without any details, the claims are rather empty at best
Absolutely! and having tattoos I care extra… the devil is always in the details
In the society we live in, I’d guess the difference is minuscule so they hide the details to justify the headline
Anecdotally, I live in Canada and tons of people have tattoos; health benchmarks are pretty decent here even if politicians have been trying really hard to dismatle our healthcare system… I feel we would have seen/suspected this before if it were significant (I work in healthcare)
All healthcare professionals should band together to ensure politicians can’t fuck uonthe healthcare system anymore
Please spare us with AI generated images.
Please spare us your pointless complaints.
Why not be a professional scientist by:
- adding “in mice” to the title;
- using modern statistical methods instead of continuously discredited procedures like p-values?
- adding “in mice” to the title;
Similarly, human immune cells previously exposed to ink also showed a weakened response to vaccination.
In a Petri dish!
There are far too many humans with tattoos that could have been researched extensively, but they chose mice. Mice do not have the same kind of skin density as humans, and I doubt a tattoo artist or researcher would have the talent to tattoo a mouse’s skin.
There’s just so many things wrong with using mice in this study. So many bad ratios with the size of the animal. I mean, for fuck’s sake, tattoo artists already practice on pig skin. Pigs would have been a better analogue, but honestly, they should have picked the millions of humans who were already tattooing themselves.
Of course, if they did that, they wouldn’t get the same result and be able to push this sensationalist science news title, now would they? Except, in this case, we’ve gone from research paper to straight to sensationalist news title in one step! Just let the institute PR department push the narrative for you, without having to wait for that pesky news cycle to crawl through the telephone game.
Human subjects are crazy to work with for a few reasons
- People don’t follow instructions perfectly
- Research subjects often don’t take the research project very seriously.
- It’s not uncommon to have dropouts, thus you either have to find more subjects or have less data.
- It’s impossible to know what the subjects are doing to cause data variability (diet, vices, etc)
- You can’t lock subjects in a room and force them to eat and drink the same food every day.
- There’s a financial (time) penalty to many research studies that can get in the way of enthusiastic participation.
Laboratory mice literally live 5 to a cage with almost no diet variability, in a controlled environment. Yes shit does happen with research mice, but it’s something that is easy to control overall.
If only there was a place where humans who have a tendency to get tattoos are in cages for an exrended period of time with a relatively consistent, trackable food intake, and constantly tracked behaviour. Humans who might even be motivated by privileges to volunteer for such studies.
I’d do it for a Nico tattoo
And yet, we manage to have hundreds of thousands of studies written about humans with human subjects. This sounds like a boatload of excuses that could be summed up as “science is hard”. Sure, it’s hard, but it’s better than putting out a flawed study that can’t scale properly.
You don’t need to sum it up as science is hard but also as science is expensive. They might simply not have gotten funding for something as that.
Sure, the study would be best if we did a randomised double blind study on a sample of 100 people that all are going to get a tattoo anyway but that doesn’t make the mouse study irrelevant.
Mice and humans, although very different in appearance have biomechanics that are very similar. For every human study you could make a 20 mouse studies with the same funding so you could do a lot more exploration.
This study found something, notably that ink in the blood affected the immune system. This just means that future studies are needed like injecting people with tattoo ink and blood samples diagnosis after tattoo to see how much ink is in the blood. If confirmed this will push tattoo ink manufacturers to develop a new ink that eliminates the effect and we can all enjoy safer more effective tattooing.
This study is not flawed, it’s pushing human knowledge forward like it always does.
It’s the size of the animal that’s important here. I’m aware that mice can sometimes have useful biomechanical similarities to humans, but this is the wrong animal to use in this case. Pigs would have been much much better.
Tattooing is a delicate operation that requires precision, even using different pressures between male and female human skin, and that does not scale well at all for an animal that is 100x smaller than a human.
You are generally not wrong but where can you find people who are tattooed, not yet vaccinated, but happy to get vaccinated for this study? It is wrong to say this definitely works the same in humans, but it is not easy to setup such a study.
Within a single city, hundreds of people get tattoos each day. A large cross-section of those probably haven’t refreshed their COVID vaccine, but only because they haven’t gotten around to it.
I think it’s more the news article that’s upselling it and with it being “groundbreaking”, it is likely only at the initial stages.
Mice are usually the first phase are they do have a similar immune response (systemically), have a fast metabolism and quick to mature. They’re also clones, which helps eliminate external factors that could contribute to what they’re studying. More or less, mice are just a quicker litmus test to just show that something is possible and if it warrants a study on a closer analogue.
Unless we dissect the original paper in its entirety, I don’t think we should dismiss their methods out of hand.
I’ll reserve judgement until peer-reviews can confirm or rebuke the results.
Just use pigs.
Basically the same thing as a human (except for the opposable thumbs, which explains us eating them), but cleaner and smarter on average.
You’re freaking out over over a single study. This is the beginning of a more comprehensive investigation. Chill your cornhole 🙂
And yet, this single study has already pushed through the news cycle in multiple directions, thanks to its dangerously deceptive headline.
It doesn’t matter if it’s gets disproven in later studies, the damage has been done.
What damage?
thats why some people get a rash at the tattoo sites, or it triggers shingles. make sense since macrophages clean up melanin pigment produced by post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, a brown spot after a severe pimple or something.
deleted by creator
Steve-O is still alive; humanity will be fine.
In the study the longest they waited after tattooing the mouse before giving the vaccine was 2 months.
They made some connections with people that had tattoos for a much longer time. But I can’t tell how meaningful those connections are.
This is well outside of my field.
Edit:
Also, it sounds like the tattooed mice were less responsive to the covid vaccine but more responsive to the Influenza vaccine.
… This is the internet. You can always be like the rest and pretend you know everything and are multi discaplined, instead of taking the proper, less fun, honest route.
As a triple MD of researchology and a minor in advanced bullshitterism, I can 100% confirm that the advice in this comment is the absolute healthiest way to interact with people on the Internet.
Also, while the mice were only tested for two months after the tattoo, researchers continued to track the health of the mice via phone calls and getting together for after work beers every third Tuesday of the month.
Source: I was probably one of the researchers or something.
Why make this comment encouraging bad behavior? This feels like injected negativity for negativity sake. Idk man, be the change you want to see in your community.
Because I am a sarcastic fuck.
I agree with you in sentiment, however; I believe the comment you’re replying to was intended as a joke.
It was sarcasm nerd
followed by a chronic phase that can persist for years.
how many years? am I doomed for life because what I did to my body when I was 18 :(
I got a tattoo on my leg when I was 17.
36 now and I’m the past year it’s gotten ridiculously itchy, bumpy and my skin is rejecting the ink and spitting it up in little spots.
I think if these effects were universal and as serious as the paper makes out, we’d have noticed them waaay sooner.
To be fair, it’s possible it has been a significant factor to weakend immune systems all along; it was just now that the connection/link with tattoo ink was identified. Not a scientist obviously, just spitballing.
And yet things like asbestos, lead, and smoking all took way longer than you’d expect (given they were a lot more universal).
All three of your examples were known to cause ill effects for centuries. The ancient Romans knew the asbestos mines were killing their slaves. Their overuse during the 20th century was not due to ignorance but corporate lobbying and political complacency.
The lobbyist play is to fund counter-studies to sow FUD even though the scientific consensus that [X Bad] is well established, because it gives an easy out for bought out politicians. However the tatoo lobby is certainly not one that I expect to be have the pull to fund FUD scientific studies to delay legislation, and if they are doing that it should be pretty easy to point to.
And yet humans have been tattooing themselves since the dawn of recorded history - significantly longer than any of those other things were around before their harm became evident.
Yes but that applies to almost everything you did when you were 18.
The anti tatto crowd licking their lips over this one.
It’s just tiresome to hear these hyperventilating articles without any real measure of the degree of risk or long term consequences.
Honestly, I think that shitty science reporting like this is fuel for the normie to science skeptic pipeline.
Which could be its primary purpose. Science skeptics are easier to manipulate.
Exactly, I understand the concept of the harm they are talking about but they don’t really give much exact examples of the degree of harm its a total nothing burger of an article
@Wubwub anti tattoo crowd? Like fundamentalist Baptists?
I suppose I would be in that crowd. I’m an atheist, but I think the whole tattooing thing is kinda stupid. To each their own of course, I don’t care if anyone gets a tattoo, but the culture around it annoys me and I think it’s a waste of one’s body. I do like some of the art styles, but why not just print it on a shirt and wear it?
That being said, I think it’s petty bad if it turns out the ink causes a higher risk of disease. Like with cigarettes in the past people weren’t informed about the consequences before making their choices. That sucks and I don’t wish it on anyone.
Like with cigarettes in the past people weren’t informed about the consequences before making their choices.
Yeah, but the tobacco cartels had performed studies which clearly demonstrated how absolutely horrible their shit was and not only not made them public, but used them to maximise addiction (and cancer, as a side effect they didn’t give a single shit about).
I very much doubt the tattoo industry has ever studied anything.
Oh definitely, the tobacco industry is way worse. Tattoo artists (at least in my county) have to follow hygiene regulations and aren’t allowed to tattoo minors, and there don’t seem to be any issues with this. There isn’t any incentive for them to cause harm to their customers, on the contrary, so I don’t blame them for this. If tattooing poses serious health risks like this study suggests, it would suck for everyone involved.
It’s good that you’ve expressed misconception as the source of this opinion, and admitted to your lack of understanding. The rest of the work could fall in nicely, if you put the effort forth. I’ll give ya one for free: “the culture around it” isn’t some singular entity, but a varied and colorful amalgam of countless inspirations, backgrounds, beliefs, reasons, etc., and the only thing that oversimplifying does here is stunt your personal growth.
You got this. 🤘🏼
Thanks, I’m good.
Hardly. 🤷🏼♂️ Not my monkey, not my circus. Good luck.
I’m a pantheist and think that tattoos are just another form of self harm
My gf has tattoos and I don’t mind them but I wish she wouldn’t get any more. Impossible to find a girl without tattoos who would date me anyway lol I tend to attract the alternative crowd and basically everyone I’d be into has them so it is what it is
in mice.
I should schedule a new tattoo appointment.
Well, then. That could explain a lot about why I always feel like I’m dying.
I have the opposite problem, my immune system is in overdrive. I should get a tattoo to reign it in.
i feel like that would cause an immediate inflammation, if your immune system is dysregulated, it would have a likely opposite effect of what it suppose to do. ive seen alot of people in tattoo sub said they had a reaction to the tattoo after its done.
are you the puzzle man?
Ah pretty interesting. Good to clarify that its in mice, not humans.
The study found that tattooed mice produced significantly lower levels of antibodies after vaccination. This effect is likely due to the impaired function of immune cells that remain associated with tattoo ink for long periods. Similarly, human immune cells previously exposed to ink also showed a weakened response to vaccination
“Human immune cells”, not cells in humans.
That’s not to say this doesn’t happen in humans, it very well may. It’s intriguing research, but it’s still only demonstrated in mice. Important to always keep that in mind until we get better information (which this research is at least leading us to).
Lots of stuff happens in mice (or pigs, or a petri dish) and we find doesn’t replicate to homo sapiens.
It’s also important to keep on mind that the burden of proof is on something to prove it is safe, not that something is unsafe. It happening to human cells in mice would have me assume it happens to human cells in humans until proven otherwise (that’s the null hypothesis in this situation). But also I don’t have a tattoo or any interest in getting one so I’m not too bothered by this.
Humans have been tattooing each other for over 5000 years. I would argue that it’s not really a case of “they need to be proven to be safe”. That ship has sailed. If they are unsafe, we should know, but I think the burden of proof has definitely shifted on tattoos given their extensive history without obvious negative repercussion
What you’re missing is that the ingredients of tattoo ink have changed dramatically in the last 100 or so years.
Prior to then tattoo inks were made mostly with soot or black ash mixed with plant oils.
Nowadays the inks are almost entirely synthetic, sourced from the same companies that make industrial paint, and have been tested and some found to contain carbon black nanoparticles, Texanol, BHT, 2-phenoxyethanol, and various other things that are confirmed (or reasonably suspected) to be toxic and which definitely wouldn’t be in historical inks.
The proof should be entirely on the suppliers and administrators (tattooists) to confirm their ink and tattoos are safe, not the users. Yet their regulations are very lax in most countries, requiring no pharmaceutical testing even though they are injected into people’s skin.
Some refs: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25833640/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38387033/
https://theconversation.com/whats-in-tattoo-ink-my-teams-chemical-analysis-found-ingredients-that-arent-on-the-label-and-could-cause-allergies-22481
I suspect the effect might be less significant in humans (not human cells, whole humans) because of the square-cube law.
Similarly, human immune cells previously exposed to ink also showed a weakened response to vaccination.
