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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) by pdfernhout on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:21AM (1 child)

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:21AM (#860375) Homepage

    See: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439226989 [amazon.com]
    "The Lyme Disease Solution is a comprehensive guide to the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease and other tick borne infections. The author, Dr. Kenneth Singleton, is a board certified specialist in Internal Medicine who himself struggled with severe symptoms of Lyme disease for 8 years prior to being correctly diagnosed and treated. His book is full of medical wisdom and practical pearls of clinical information that every Lyme patient will find immensely useful."

    A lot of options are discussed their from diet to herbs and more.

    It seems the Lyme bacteria have different stages -- including a spore-like encysted form one that are essentially invulnerable to antibiotics. You have to hit the bacteria when it is in an active stage (like when replicating) and vulnerable to antibiotics. That is why Lyme is so hard to eradicate with antibiotics.

    See: https://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-2094-5-40 [biomedcentral.com]
    "The long latent stage seen in syphilis, followed by chronic central nervous system infection and inflammation, can be explained by the persistence of atypical cystic and granular forms of Treponema pallidum. We investigated whether a similar situation may occur in Lyme neuroborreliosis. ... The results indicate that atypical extra- and intracellular pleomorphic and cystic forms of Borrelia burgdorferi and local neuroinflammation occur in the brain in chronic Lyme neuroborreliosis. The persistence of these more resistant spirochete forms, and their intracellular location in neurons and glial cells, may explain the long latent stage and persistence of Borrelia infection. The results also suggest that Borrelia burgdorferi may induce cellular dysfunction and apoptosis. The detection and recognition of atypical, cystic and granular forms in infected tissues is essential for the diagnosis and the treatment as they can occur in the absence of the typical spiral Borrelia form."

    In general, people in western countries eating a western diet have such diminished immune systems that they have trouble resisting such infections (including removing the cystic forms).

    Dr. Joel Fuhrman has a newsletter article that discusses how he has cured many Lyme patients (he is based in New Jersey) who have been on antibiotics for years (prescribed by other MDs) by improving their diet.

    One thing he has on that which is available easily:
    https://www.drfuhrman.com/get-started/health-concerns/13/lyme-disease [drfuhrman.com]
    "Taking antibiotics long term has dangerous consequences, such as killing beneficial gut bacteria, interfering with vitamin absorption, yeast overgrowth, severe allergic reactions, and resistance to antibiotics; but the main issue is increased cancer risk from antibiotics in the future. Occasionally, people may still feel poorly after being adequately treated for Lyme. They do not need more antibiotics, rather, they need to get healthier and detoxify from the antibiotics they took and the killed spirochetes that have to be dealt with. Long-term adherence to a nutritarian diet can maximize the body’s self-healing potential and can help Lyme disease sufferers to recover quicker and more completely."

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by MikeVDS on Friday June 28 2019, @01:19AM

    by MikeVDS (1142) on Friday June 28 2019, @01:19AM (#860772)

    I have seen many articles and books like this and they make many claims, and there are actual scientific studies that test for many of these things. I am looking for science, not an "expert" opinion, because you can find that saying just about anything you want.