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Comment by code_runner | Hacker News Reader

People have been getting tattoos for a pretty long time. I don't really see this as stopping that?

If you have tattoos its entirely possible you'll actually be more careful in the sun by applying sunscreen.... but you also might be more prone to showing your ink off and therefore exposing a greater area of skin to the sun.

If there is some common ingredient that has been used in tattoo inks recently and we're concerned about that, let me know.... but generally speaking I don't think this is interesting information

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It's mostly only here on HN where people (in their commenter persona) take this kind of study so seriously and pretend that they must either live uncompromising teetotaling lives in pursuit of optimal and maximally long health, or that the study has to be nonsense/misleading.

In reality, all of us live lives that put at greater risk of this and lesser risk of that. The real value of learning that there's perhaps some association with one of our activities and a specific disease or other kind of harm is that we can be watchful of that disease or harm emerging in our own lives and thereby give ourselves more opportunity to respond. Or perhaps we might use it as reason to moderate, or to finally stop doing something we already feel conflicted about.

So this kind of thing is definitely interesting information for some people, but as often for HN, we can expect a lot of comments engaging with it only in extremes of condemnation or refutation.

Scientific research doesn’t have to directly impact personal decision making to be useful and interesting. This study provides a data point suggesting a link between having tattoos and skin cancer - it’s certainly interesting to the medical field to better understand what increases the risk of cancer. A lot of research into smoking cigarettes and cancer also didn’t have much impact on people who decided to smoke, but it was also valuable knowledge.

> If you have tattoos its entirely possible you'll actually be more careful in the sun by applying sunscreen.... but you also might be more prone to showing your ink off and therefore exposing a greater area of skin to the sun.

Knowing multiple tattoo artists, that's exactly what they observe from their customers : some are very careful about their skin exposure while other are doing the exact opposite.

They are not healthcare professionnal so they don't study skin cancers, but they can easily tell which one is which based on how the tattoo evolve year after year.

This could probably be the easiest factor to check.

Regarding the inks, since there's little to no regulation, even in the EU, and people tend to get tattooed when away from home, it could be much, much trickier.

Most inks up until the 20th century were carbon black (some vermilion and prussian blue). That changed with the introduction of both organic and inorganic color dyes over the last 100 years. Only recently has there been much regulation at all.

https://echa.europa.eu/hot-topics/tattoo-inks

Ink composition and regulation might vary regionally. The original article mentions

> The most frequently used tattoo ink is black. Black ink typically contains soot products like carbon black, which is listed as possibly carcinogenic to humans (mainly based on studies of carbon black inhalation and risk of lung cancer) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) [13]. Through the incomplete combustion used for carbon black production, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are formed as byproducts. One of the most dangerous of these is benzo[a]pyrene (BaP), which is classified as carcinogenic to humans by the IARC [14].

You really don't want benzo[a]pyrene floating around your system, it's a potent carcinogen that's been firmly established by many studies. Some papers focus on directly on PAHs and tattoos, for example this PLoS One 2014 paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24670978/

I don't think the result of this study would stop people from getting tattoos, but if you're on the fence, then perhaps it could sway you. Either way, it can provide information to doctors to perhaps screen them more often for skin cancer, or people to get screened, given that it might show a higher risk.

> you also might be more prone to showing your ink off and therefore exposing a greater area of skin to the sun.

Seems likely

Care and feeding of tattoos is largely a new thing. The vast majority of people do not care.

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