"Some patients with Lyme disease still show symptoms long after their treatment has finished.
Now proteins have been discovered that set these people apart from those who are easily cured."
Posted by Lymetoo (Member # 743) on :
I think this is mostly bad news... esp when you consider the source!!!!
Quote:
"People who experience the symptoms of Lyme disease, which include fatigue, soreness and memory or concentration loss, after treatment for the disorder are sometimes diagnosed as having chronic Lyme disease or post-Lyme disease syndrome. But these diagnoses are difficult to make, because the individuals no longer seem to harbour the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. And the symptoms could instead be indicative of chronic fatigue syndrome or depression."
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and:
"But a predictive marker won't be useful without new therapies for the persistent symptoms, says Henry Feder Jr, a physician specializing in infectious diseases at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. If an immune response problem leads to the syndrome, antibiotics won't help. "I guarantee you that if you tell a patient they won't feel better after antibiotics, they won't," Feder says. "We need to know what's going on."
Posted by RC1 (Member # 31923) on :
Are they talking about 4 weeks of doxy here? How would they explain the regular cycles of herxing? Oh, maybe it's chronic fatigue syndrome or depression. Oh boy.
Posted by Lymetoo (Member # 743) on :
More:
""This is the first study I've seen that shows some immunologic difference between someone who resolves their Lyme and someone who develops post-Lyme disease syndrome," says Linda Bockenstedt, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
The presence of varied antibodies hints that the chronic symptoms could be caused by an ongoing inflammatory response caused by antibodies mistakenly reacting to the body's own proteins, Bockenstedt suggests.
"The big question to me is whether this can lead to an autoimmune phenomenon," says Bockenstedt. "But if that were the case, I'd expect the disease to worsen without immune-modulating treatment, and it doesn't."