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AROUND THE WORLD
MRI Concerns
Article from "HEALTH" magazine
September issue 1997
WHEN A TATTOO IS TRULY SHOCKING
(TORONTO, ONTARIO)
Tattoos may be all the fashion on the streets, but in the doctor's office they could be a pain in the .....side. Or worse.
Recently a 24-year-old woman complaining of back pain was admitted to Scarborough Grace Hospital. The doctors ordered magnetic resonance imaging, putting her in the tunnel-like machine that photographs the body's insides. But as soon as the contraption started up, the woman cried out, saying she felt a burning pain. When doctors asked her where exactly it hurt, she pointed to a tattoo on her left hip, a small rose entwined with black thorns.
The pain stopped immediately, and the slight swelling subsided in 12 hours. But Michael Kreidstein a plastic surgeon at the hospital, wondered what had gone wrong. He requested tattoo inks from a supplier, then tested each to see if it could be affected by a magnetic field like the one used for MRI.
Two of the inks, one black and one brown, contained so much iron oxide that droplets of dye could be pulled across a plastic sheet with a common horseshoe magnet. This ingredient may pose a hazard in an MRI machine, since magnetic metals can convert its radio-frequency pulses into electricity. What the young women felt, Kreidstein surmises, was either a weak electric current coursing through her skin or the pigmented skin being tugged from her body by the MRI's magnetic pull. Ouch.
It's known that women with permanent eyeliner, which may contain metals, can suffer swelling and pain from MRI's. But until now no one has thought to worry about the legions of tattooed hipsters who sooner or later are going to need a scan. There likely fate? Before her next trip into the MRI, the 24-year-old patient had to have her tattoo removed.
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