Local oncologist Dr. Steven Kalter of the START Center for Cancer Care says a scary incident in Australia should make today's body-art crazed millennials think twice about getting a tattoo, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Dr. Kalter says what had been diagnosed with lymphoma had one of the enlarged lymph nodes removed from her armpit, and doctors discovered that it wasn't cancer at all...it was a collection of immune cells which had been contaminated by the dye from a tattoo that the woman had received fifteen years earlier
."Turned out that when the biopsy was taken this wasn't a lymphoma, not a malignancy at all, but rather a reaction from the tattoo dye," Dr. Kalter said.
Dr. Kalter says this is very uncommon, but that may be because the body art craze has only been around for a couple of decades, and he is worried it may become more common in coming years.
He says it is critical that anybody going under the ink pay close attention to the level of cleanliness followed at the tattooing establishment.
"Carefully observe the tattoo artist at work before you agree to have a tattoo placed."
He says he's concerned that this is just the first of many cases that will come in the next few decades, as people who got all tatted up in their teens and twenties start moving into middle age.
"Certainly the lymph nodes are the guardians of our body," he said. "We saw this enlargement of the lymph nodes as a reaction to a foreign substance."
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