Tattoos increase cancer risk—a little

A tattoo increases your chances of lymphoma, a cancer of the blood—but it’s nowhere near as risky as the media is suggesting.

It can raise the risk by 21 percent, and the risk increases if you have another tattoo within two years, researchers from Lund University in Sweden have calculated.

In one of the biggest studies into the dangers of tattooing, the researchers questioned nearly 12,000 people, aged between 20 and 60 years, in the Swedish National Cancer Register who were compared with similar numbers of healthy controls.

Around 21 percent in the cancer register had tattoos, compared with 18 percent in the healthy controls, and the researchers reckoned that having a tattoo increased the risk of malignant lymphoma, a blood cancer that affects the lymphatic system.

So, it increases the risk—but first you have to know what the actual risk is in the first place.  The overall risk of malignant lymphoma—irrespective of age—is around 2 percent, which means that two out of every hundred people develop the cancer for any reason.  Having a tattoo increases that risk by 20 percent, the Lund researchers have discovered, which means that, in absolute terms, a tattoo increases the chance of malignant lymphoma by around 0.5 percent.

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