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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 26 2019, @05:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the feeling-tired? dept.

New approaches may help solve the Lyme disease diagnosis dilemma

Lyme disease [is] one of the most charged and controversial of all infections. It's not hard to find tick-bitten patients who live for years with undiagnosed and unexplained symptoms that defy repeated treatment attempts. Patient advocates point to people who agonize for years, drifting from doctor to doctor in search of relief. Battles with insurers who won't pay for therapy without a definitive diagnosis have played out in courthouses and statehouses. Desperate patients sometimes turn to solutions that may pose their own risks. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently described people who had developed serious complications, or even died, after unproven treatments for Lyme disease.

Many, if not most, of these problems are caused by the lack of a reliable test for the infection. "This deficiency in Lyme disease diagnosis is probably the most prevalent thing that is responsible for the controversies of this disease," says Paul Arnaboldi, an immunologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla.

That's why Arnaboldi and other researchers are trying to devise better diagnostics (SN: 9/16/17, p. 8). The standard two-part test that's used now, which has changed little in concept since the 1990s, may miss about half of infected people in the early weeks of illness. The test relies on finding markers that show the immune system is actively engaged. For some people, it takes up to six weeks for those signs to reach detectable levels.

To find better ways to diagnose the disease more reliably and maybe sooner, scientists are trying to identify genetic changes that occur in the body even before the immune system rallies. Other researchers are measuring immune responses that may prove more accurate than existing tests.

The science has advanced enough, according to a review in the March 15 Clinical Infectious Diseases, that within the next few years, tests may finally be able to measure infections directly [DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciy614] [DX]. The aim is to amplify traces of the Lyme bacteria's genetic material in the bloodstream. Enough approaches are in various stages of research that some patient advocates have renewed optimism that the problems with testing may finally become a thing of the past.

Lyme Disease Cases Are Exploding. And It's Only Going to Get Worse.

First identified in 1975 in the leafy New England town of Old Lyme, Connecticut, Lyme disease has now reached what experts consider pandemic proportions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of confirmed cases of Lyme disease in the U.S. has more than doubled in the two decades leading up to 2017 (the most recent year for which final figures are available) and increased 17% from 2016 to 2017 alone. More than half the counties in the U.S. are considered high-risk areas for Lyme, according to the CDC, and in some areas, as many as six out of 10 ticks carry the infection.

[...] We now live in a frightening new normal: It's estimated that 300,000 people contract Lyme every year in the U.S., with victims found not just in traditionally tick-heavy areas like upstate New York and Maine, but also in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. While most people are cured quickly with antibiotics, some go on to experience lingering symptoms characteristic of Lyme, like headaches, fatigue, and joint and muscle pain, for months or longer after they've been treated, a condition known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS). According to a recent study led by experts at the Brown University School of Public Health, the number of people in the U.S. with PTLDS was estimated to be 1.5 million in 2016 and is predicted to rise to nearly 2 million by 2020.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by MikeVDS on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:23PM (2 children)

    by MikeVDS (1142) on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:23PM (#860091)

    I think his comment was referring to the fact that the science on this is showing that Lyme Disease, is curable, but sometimes the symptoms persist and even get worse and no one knows why. There is a cult-like following that says it's a continuation of the active disease, even though study after study seem to show otherwise. I don't have the answer and no one does, so people cling onto a hypothesis that becomes less and less likely and pays 10's of thousands of dollars on treatments, that show to be as effective as placebo and has negative side effects. I know someone who died of "Lyme" who paid for those expensive treatments and I know of another person who is going to start them soon. Hope and fear are often more powerful than rationality.

    I would love if someone showed me that I am wrong about this but every source someone gives me, even the ones with scientific study citations, have been quack jobs. When you actually look at the studies (or at least the into for the ones behind paywalls), they all seem to either not say what the article claims or often directly contradict what they claim.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday June 26 2019, @04:57PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 26 2019, @04:57PM (#860156) Journal

    If that's happening, my guess would be that the immune system is activated against the body. Certainly other things are known to work that way. All that would be needed is for the causative organism to be attacked by some protein that had a signature matching some protein used by the body. Then wherever that protein was used, you'd be attacked by your own immune system.

    OTOH, my wife wasn't warned to expect that kind of problem. (She didn't, possibly because it was caught within hours.)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Friday June 28 2019, @10:17PM

    by jimtheowl (5929) on Friday June 28 2019, @10:17PM (#861137)
    Is that what is comment was referring to? Could have fooled me.