Parents now have another reason to frown on tongue piercing – a potentially fatal brain abscess suffered by a young woman in Connecticut.
The woman’s tongue became sore and swollen two or three days after it was pierced, and she reported a foul-tasting discharge from the pierced region. The infection healed in a few days after she removed the stud from her tongue, but a month later she suffered severe headaches, fever, nausea and vomiting.
A scan at the Yale University hospital revealed the brain abscess, which physicians drained. She recovered after six weeks of intravenous antibiotic treatment.
“This sort of brain abscess is very serious,” Richard Martinello of Yale’s medical school told New Scientist. Modern medicine can kill the infecting bacteria, but he says “in the past, there was a very high mortality rate.”
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In the blood
Such brain abscesses are rare, and normally linked to sinus or ear infections. The patient showed no sign of sinus problems, and Martinello said the bacteria that cause the brain abscess “were those typically found in persons’ mouths”.
The blood commonly picks up some bacteria from infections, but normally the immune system wipes them out. In this case, he thinks the blood carried enough bacteria from the tongue infection to cause the brain abscess.
Infections at the sites of body piercings are relatively common, but this is the first brain abscess linked to any piercing. The tongue is particularly vulnerable to infections because the mouth is warm, moist and full of bacteria.
Martinello says it is important to realise that such infections have the potential to cause dangerous complications.
