Lyme Science Blog

The woman, a mother to three boys, initially assumed a lump in her breast was due to Lyme disease. “Before I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I thought a lump I had found was part of my Lyme disease. I thought, ‘Okay, let me just watch this and see if it goes away over the […]

Researchers surveyed 137 participants from 11 professional and recreational organizations across New Brunswick between December 2018 and February 2019 to better understand Lyme disease in canada. Thirty-six percent of the participants spent time outdoors for their occupation and 64% for recreational activities. Only one of the participants had been previously diagnosed with Lyme disease in

In the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) guidelines, Wormser and colleagues initially dismissed Lyme disease symptoms as nothing more than the aches and pains of daily living.[2] A Lyme literate doctor would disagree. That conclusion, however, has been undermined by findings from clinical trials, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which report

An article entitled “Antibiotic treatment in patients that present with solely non-specific symptoms and positive serology at a Lyme centre,” published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, ¹ describes a study which addresses the question: Are short-term antibiotics used to treat Lyme disease effective in patients whose symptoms are subjective? The study examined 97 patients

Dr. Baker, director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, who was responsible for overseeing The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Lyme disease program, wrote in his article, “The results of 5 placebo-controlled clinical trials on the efficacy of extended antibiotic therapy for the treatment of post-Lyme disease symptoms provided no evidence of

The authors compared 16 individuals with Lyme disease receiving TNF-α inhibitors with 32 healthy controls to understand whether suppressing their immunity is harmful. The individuals had confirmed Lyme disease with an erythema migrans rash manifestation. The patients received immune-suppressing medications, which included adalimumab, infliximab, etanercept, golimumab. These were often combined with other immunosuppressant drugs for

Clinicians face great challenges in diagnosing disorders that involve symptoms seen in both general medicine and psychiatry, ” wrote Robert Bransfield, MD, a psychiatrist and professor at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. All too often, these patients are labeled as having “excessive” symptoms and given outdated diagnoses (i.e. psychosomatic disorder). Symptoms of Lyme disease

In their article “Functional signs in patients consulting for presumed Lyme borreliosis,” Voitey et al. [1] found that in the 48 patients diagnosed with Lyme disease, the most common functional symptoms were arthralgia (23%), neuropathic pain (23%) and asthenia (17%). Asthenia is characterized by abnormal physical weakness or lack of energy. Their result raise concerns whether

As the authors point out, “Concurrent polymicrobial infections in humans can have a synergistic effect and result in a more severe course of illness.” In an effort to investigate what percentage of ticks have Lyme disease, the researchers examined three tick species, including the deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), found in Suffolk County, Long Island. Their