Tattoos as a risk factor for malignant lymphoma: a population-based case–control study

This is a well presented paper, which is completely open access. One thing that I would like to see made more clear is that although they pulled medical records for 30000 people, due to incomplete data and issues with family consent, the actual dataset used in this study is closer to 3000. The definition of "tattoo" used in this study includes medical tattoos and permanent makeup, which may affect the overall results - I'd therefore like to potentially see a dataset that is solely traditional tattoos, then compare these findings to other tattoos such as medical or permanent makeup, to see if the different techniques or inks used makes a difference. This would perhaps be outside the realms of this study, but would make for good future lines of enquiry. The study found that any correlation between tattoos and skin cancer to be coincidental, and the occurrence of lymphoma to be increased by 21% in tattooed patients. However the lymphoma results are contradictory as those with smaller/fewer tattoos actually had a higher occurrence than those with larger/more tattoos. The authors do however acknowledge that causation cannot be determined by this study alone and that further research is needed, so I therefore found the discussion to be appropriate.

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