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.
Thanks for chiming in, but I’m not sure I understand the implications. It’s not trustworthy ? I shouldn’t listen to the conclusions ?
The implications are the variables are conflated and the conclusions are overblown.
It should come as no surprise that acute trauma and injecting a foreign substance would cause a relatively significant immunological response. The issue is that for the “chronic phase”, which is where the novelty of this research lies, the evidence shown is far from difinitive compared to the story being told and what results are shown aren’t overly significant.
Even if you 100% believe the paper the conclusion is that the effect of getting tattooed is, arguably, similar to catching the flu once. However, the paper itself tried to obfuscate that so they have a more impactful result and the marketing/outreach/media site that was linked here doubles down on it trying to sell the story of “tattoos==illness and death”!!!
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?
Steve-O is still alive; humanity will be fine.
Please spare us with AI generated images.
Dude, that’s a real pirate mouse! Up close it will squeek in arrr noises.
Please spare us your pointless complaints.
Ha, get bent.
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 thkes 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
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!
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.
in mice.
I should schedule a new tattoo appointment.
Ephemeral Remi should be dead by now.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
would it be possible to solve this problem by making different inks? or would any ink that doesn’t have this problem just inherently be non-permanent
Not a biologist but I believe the latter. If the ink could be broken down by the macrophages in your lymph nodes it would likely be broken down in its intended location in your skin too, as their are lyphatic capillaries and vessels throughout our skin.
