The hidden danger of tattoos! Doctors cut out cervix and uterus of tattooed woman

Tattoo ink led to false cancer positive

Have a tattoo or thinking about getting tattooed, what happened to one California woman may have you thinking twice.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - A woman had her uterus, pelvic lymph nodes, cervix and Fallopian tubes removed after a PET scan showed what doctors believed to be cervical cancer that had spread throughout her body.

Following the surgery the tissue was sent to a lab for testing but it came back negative for cancer, despite the entire region showing positive on the scan. In fact the culprit was tattoo ink, which had been absorbed into the woman's lymphatic system from the dozen or so tattoos the woman had on her thighs.

The still unidentified woman was 32-years-old and the mother of four and had previously been diagnosed with cervical cancer, LiveScience reported. After the diagnosis doctors order a PET scan to see if the cancer had spread, and because of the ink showing a massive spread of cancer cells doctors decided to act quickly in order to save the woman's life.

Tattoo ink has been known to cause false positives in PET scans before, however, the incident is rare. Tattooed patients may need to undergo other tests if they have positive readings for certain kinds of cancer.

Dr. Ramez Eskander, the assistant clinical professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of California detailed the incident in a report published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

"Those lymph nodes that were lighting up brightly on the PET scan were doing so because of the tattoo pigment that was in the lymph nodes," he wrote.

"There have previously been reports of tattoo ink spreading to people's lymph nodes and showing up on PET scans in patients with other cancers, including breast cancer and melanoma. But this appears to be the first case reported in a patient with cervical cancer."

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