Tongue Piercing A Fad With Serious Dental and Physical Consequences People who undergo body piercing may consider it a form of body art and self-expression, no different from wearing earrings. But possible damage to dental and oral structures can result from piercing, according to Diana Ram and Benjamin Peretz in the Journal of Dentistry for Children. Dentists are often the first to note any harmful effects. Dentists who treat teenagers are becoming accustomed to seeing more patients with jewelry inside and around the mouth, the article notes. Most mouth jewelry takes the form of removable studs, hoops or barbell-shaped devices that are purchased commercially. Dentists are often the first to note any harmful effects resulting from the piercing process or the jewelry itself, such as fractures or cracks in the tooth structure caused by a metallic barbell stud. Additional negative effects include: • pain • post-placement edema • prolonged bleeding • gingival injury • permanent numbness • loss of taste • oral hygiene problems In addition, piercing has been identified by the National Institutes of Health as a possible vehicle for transmission of hepatitis B, C, D, and G, and also of HIV. This is very serious! Persons who are involved in body piercing in any way are putting their lives and the lives of others in jeopardy. Body piercers are not members of the medical profession. In one case, a teen with a diagnosed ventricular septal defect did not take any prophylactic antibiotics before the piercing and was unaware of the possible complications of the procedure and its association with the heart defect. The article points out that the needle inserted through the tongue during piercing may have allowed bacteria to enter the bloodstream, resulting in infective bacterial endocarditis, another life-threatening disease. Most episodes of tongue piercing may proceed uneventfully, but the severity of reported complications makes the practice difficult to condone. Any time skin or oral tissues are pierced there is always the potential risk for infection. And the high level of bacteria on the tongue raises the risk considerably. Body piercers are unlicensed and are not members of the medical profession. Usually, no health histories are taken at tongue-piercing establishments, no emergency kits are available, no prophylactic antibiotics are used, and no postoperative care is available. The following is a recent Associated Press article that shows an extreme example of the danger of piercing one's tongue:  CHICAGO - The teenager said the stabbing pains in her face felt like electrical shocks that lasted 10 to 30 seconds and struck 20 to 30 times a day.  Her doctors diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder sometimes called "suicide disease" because of the excruciating and dispiriting pain it causes.  Doctors tried painkillers, then stronger medication, but in the end, a cure proved more simple: The young woman removed the metal stud from her pierced tongue.  Two days later her pain vanished. The account in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association is the latest documentation of complications, some life-threatening, linked to tongue piercing.  Other problems include tetanus, heart infections, brain abscess, chipped teeth and receding gums. One woman developed so much scar tissue that it resembled what she called a "second tongue." In the newly reported case, the young Italian woman's mouth jewelry apparently irritated a nerve running along the jaw under her tongue. That nerve is connected to the trigeminal nerve, one of the largest in the head.  "There are people who have been dropped to their knees" by trigeminal neuralgia, said Alana Greca, a registered nurse and director of patient support for the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association. "That's how intense and how horrendous the pain can be." The teenager is lucky her pain disappeared, Greca said.  "Certainly, this was an isolated case, an extremely rare complication of this kind of piercing," said Dr. Marcelo Galarza, a neurosurgeon at Villa Maria Cecilia Hospital in Ravenna, Italy, who reported the case to the journal. The tongue is "a particularly dangerous place to pierce" because it is rich in blood vessels that can spread infection to major organs and because it is near important nerves and the upper airway, he said. Jeanne Fritch, owner of Personal Art, a piercing and tattooing studio in Lake Station, Ind., said she has not heard of a similar case in her 21 years in business.  Fritch recommended people interested in tongue piercing see only professional, experienced piercers and use only "implant grade" metal jewelry. Good mouth hygiene while the tongue heals also is important, Fritch said. Stefania Fraccalvieri, the patient in the report, is now 21 and a student in Rome. Her advice to people considering tongue piercing: "Don't do that. My experience was so bad. I was so sick and now I feel much better." Teen's tongue piercing linked to extreme facial pain by Carla K. Johnson Associated Press Oct. 17, 2006 01:13 PM On the Net: JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org   An article in the Journal of the California Dental Association, August 2007 states: "Tongue piercing is a risk factor for gingival recession, especially when the bar is longer than 1.6 cm and the ornament is in place for at least two years. Most of the reported piercing-induced gingival damages are related to lip ornaments, probably because the usual metal flattened disk jewelry in the lip induces more traumatic damage to the tissue, compared with the usual ball ornament in the tongue." The authors reported a case where bone was lost on the tongue side of the lower front teeth due to the local irritation induced by the sphere of a tongue ornament.