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Indeed. It's not the ink content that led to Am J Clin Pathol. 2014;142(1):99-103. saying:

"The mean age of death for tattooed persons was 39 years, compared with 53 years for non-tattooed persons (P = .0001). There was a significant contribution of negative messages in tattoos associated with non-natural death (P = .0088) but not with natural death."




I'm not sure "people with negative msgs in tattoos died 14 years earlier" sheds light for me on the TFA.

TFA has a more direct, physical, concern - it starts from a well-known, that tattoo ink ends up in lymph nodes, and it does a statistical analysis showing there's a significant statistical result in lymphoma occurence.

I think people with negative tattoos dying younger reduces the # of people with tattoos who get lymphoma, as they have less ink-in-lymph-nodes years.


It shows the existence of some very strong confounding mechanisms.


There's certainly plenty of those! :)

I doubt they intended to communicate something that general, and if they did, I doubt they meant to pick one that would reinforce the conclusion.




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