Tongue piercing can lead to serious, life-threatening complications, warns an article in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Stefania Fraccalvieri, a patient described 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."

Fraccalvieri's doctors diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder sometimes called suicide disease because of the excruciating and dispiriting pain it causes.

Health Canada notes that piercings are on the rise, with a dramatic increase of tattoo and piercing shops over the past few years. The federal agency warns that viral infections such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV and AIDS can be transmitted through tattooing and piercing.

In the case chronicled in JAMA, 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.

Other problems related to tongue piercing 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.

Some people "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.