Topic: Percentage of people that relapse after treating acute Lyme properly?
James1979
Unregistered
posted
If we follow correctly the ILADS guidelines by taking the higher dosages of abx for 2 months after the symptoms end, does anybody know the percentage of people that end up having a relapse after they stop the abx?
This question is in regards to acute Lyme infections which were treated right at onset of first symptoms. I'm sure with chronic Lyme there are way too many variables to draw statistics.
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TF
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 14183
posted
I got rid of lyme 6 years ago. Then, about 2 years ago I got bitten again and got a bulls eye rash.
My lyme doc treated me for it with 30 days of meds (2 different meds to cover coinfections and lyme) starting within a week of the bite and since I never got any other symptoms, he said I was finished. It worked.
However, the question is, did I really have a strain of lyme that can cause disseminated disease, or, would I have done fine if the doc had done nothing?
We dicussed the finding that many strains of lyme cannot cause anything but the bulls eye rash. When I reported to the doc that on day 3 of meds, I had a mild herx reaction, he said, "Well, I think you had the real thing" meaning the strain of lyme that could have made me sick.
So, this is the complicating factor in your question.
Cure Unknown excerpts:
p. 342 tells how Ben Luft, infectious disease specialist and Daniel Dykhuizen, evolutionary biologist, working together at Stony Brook went out into the field collecting ticks and analyzing Borrelia. A few years later, they had a graduate student travel the Eastern seaboard as far north as New Hampshire and south through the Carolinas collecting ticks infected with B. burgdorferi spirochetes. p.343 �The Borrelia were duly isolated and compared for differences in their genes.
Eventually the researchers focused on twenty strains, each with a different version of the changeable OspC. Working with those twenty strains, Luft learned that six didn�t infect humans and ten caused only a rash. Only four of the twenty could leave the skin to invade other tissue like the heart and joints or the brain. The most virulent of the strains turned out to be the prototypical B31, the version of B. burgdorferi � ultimately isolated by Burgdorfer and Barbour at the Rocky Mountain labs in 1981.�
The implications are profound. One of the most important is that if just four strains of the twenty cause disseminated infection, then the roster of rash-based studies on the treatment of early Lyme disease, conducted from the 1980s to the present, would have to be reassessed. Take a moment to ponder the simple math: It would be impossible to accept results based on the assumption that 100 percent of Lyme rashes can cause invasive disease when a significant percent cannot. Some of the classic studies claim very high cure rates for early infection; yet if the causative strain were of the rash-only variety, then even orange juice would be a �cure.� Are recommended treatment protocols truly curing most of those with early, invasive borreliosis? Or has noise from rash-only strains obscured less rosy results?� (p. 344)
Posts: 9931 | From Maryland | Registered: Dec 2007
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posted
I wouldn't ever use the word "cannot" in conjunction with Bb. "Are not known to" is a proper substitution, scientifically speaking. We really don't know enough to come to any definitive conclusions.
I've probably read at least 100 studies on Bb since I diagnosed myself six weeks or so ago. Based on the information I've gathered from those studies and verbal testimony of leading researchers I would say the number of people who go on to suffer from chronic problems after being treated for Lyme disease is approximately 10-20%.
That, of course, would vary greatly if we broke it down by location, length of infection, etc.
Like TF mentions, there are different strains of borrelia so which strain the person is infected with would likely come into the equation as well.
Posts: 156 | From Virginia | Registered: May 2011
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