The full paper is here and, as usual, it's hardly anything and decontextualized in order to get a publishable result.
This one is so bad that it doesn't use established baselines or do any form of statistical analysis on the results instead opting for their own "baseline" measurements using very small sample sizes. It also plays a smoke and mirrors game where it shows a result for short term immunological response and then uses that to insinuate the 'slightly reduced but still likely well within the error of the poor control' long term effects are worth noting.
Other major flaws:
- As others have mentioned, mice are a terrible model for this as their skin is very thin and proper tattooing is near impossible.
- They mention verifying with human cadavers but don't include any data from those.
- There was no control group, the baseline was an untreated mouse, not one with an acute foot trauma.
- Mice age very quickly, best I can tell the immunological markers weren't age controlled. 2 months out of a <2 year lifespan is a lot of aging. Again, if there was a proper control to measure against.
- The obsfucation of the raw data into cheesy and unreadable box and whisker plots is hella suspicious.
At best it's a very poorly communicated and poorly designed experiment but I suspect that's due to it result hunting.
