Lyme Science Blog

Find a Lyme Doctor Using Telemedicine It can be difficult to find a Lyme doctor who treats patients who do not live in an endemic area or have a history of a tick bite. It can also be difficult to find a doctor when a person presents with non-specific manifestations of Lyme disease, which may […]

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

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 All too often, these patients are labeled as having “excessive” symptoms and given outdated diagnoses (i.e. psychosomatic disorder).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 are

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

In their  article Lyme Carditis: A Rare Presentation of Sinus Bradycardia Without Any Conduction Defects, Grella and colleagues present “a unique case of Lyme carditis, without the classical findings of Lyme disease [such as a rash] or common EKG findings of AV conduction abnormalities.”¹ The case highlights the differences in Lyme disease guidelines. A 56–year-old

After 37 years treating Lyme disease, I’ve seen patients produce psychiatric symptoms so severe they are diagnosed with depression, anxiety, psychosis, or conversion disorder—and never tested for infection. Some are told their symptoms are stress. Others are told they’re seeking attention. By the time the underlying cause is identified, years of misdiagnosis may have passed—making