posted
This was on tonight. It's a re-enactment medical show. The patient went to the emergency
room, with fever, eye pain, and leg weakness. After she said she was in Connecticut three
months ago, the doctor rules out "Lymes" because she doesn't recall a tick bite or rash. He does
an MRI, sees lesions, and diagnoses her with MS. Then, she goes downhill after getting
steroids, so he questions the MS diagnosis. He then diagnoses her with syphilis, but then
realizes she can't have that after her husband tests negative. So then he goes against the
rules and does a test he's not allowed to do, to test directly for the Lyme bacteria. She tests
positive for this, and he is a hero, especially since "Lymes" is so easy to treat and can be
easily "cured."
Posts: 311 | From CA | Registered: Jul 2008
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Leelee
Frequent Contributor (1K+ posts)
Member # 19112
posted
Hopefully some good will come out of this program.
Thanks for posting.
-------------------- The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King,Jr Posts: 1573 | From Maryland | Registered: Feb 2009
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-------------------- worrying about tomorrow takes its strength away from today Posts: 970 | From Point PLeasant , NJ | Registered: Jan 2008
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posted
I didn't know they could "rule out" Lyme based on patients report of a tick bite, or lack of. That's crazy.
Posts: 822 | From midwest | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
I saw it also and was wondering what test directly checks for the bacteria instead of the antibodies. The show didn't make sense in response to all I've read about Lyme disease.
Posts: 4 | From MD | Registered: Jul 2009
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"Highly specific borreliacidal antibodies are induced by infection with Borrelia burgdorferi, and a borreliacidal antibody test (BAT) may be an accurate laboratory procedure for confirming Lyme disease in clinical practice. To investigate this, 34 Lyme disease sera and 34 sera from patients with other illnesses who had presented to a primary-care facility located in an area of borreliosis endemicity were tested by the BAT and Western blotting (WB).
The BAT was more sensitive (79% versus 65%; P = 0.090), especially in cases in which patients had a single erythema migrans lesion (P = 0.021). In addition, the potentially cross-reactive sera were negative by the BAT but WB yielded three (9%) false-positive results.
The results from 104 sera from possible Lyme disease patients demonstrated the clinical usefulness of the more sensitive and specific BAT. The BAT was positive for 40 (38%) sera from patients with Lyme disease-related symptoms and appropriate clinical and epidemiological findings.
WB confirmed Lyme disease in 30 (75%) of the 40 BAT-positive patients but failed to detect B. burgdorferi infection in 10 BAT-positive patients. WB was also positive for 11 BAT-negative sera, but six (55%) patients had case histories which suggested that the results were false positives.
Collectively, the results confirm that the BAT is a sensitive and highly specific test and suggest that widespread use would increase the accuracy of serodiagnostic confirmation of Lyme disease."
Personally, I highly doubt it's very good, or that much better than a WB, if we haven't been hearing about it for this long.
This study is pretty meaningless to me, since they didn't test against DNA-positive cases, and NO controls. They just tested *possible Lyme patients*, and then "patients with other illnesses" (were they screened via PCR for possible missed Lyme? No.). I mean, what kind of a study IS that? Kinda pointless, IMHO.
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mtree
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