Tufts CTSI and Tufts University receive 4 NIH supplemental grant awards
"Searching for Persistence of Infection in Lyme Disease" is a highly innovative
Bench-to-Bedside research project that could have an extraordinarily significant impact on the field of Lyme disease.
Although antibiotic therapy is clinically effective in treating the symptoms of Lyme disease for most patients early in the course of
disease, a significant number of patients who receive therapy report persistent symptoms.
A range of theories have been proposed for why this occurs.
Moreover, commonly available tests for human Lyme disease are not able to determine persistent infection after antibiotic therapy.
Program Director, Linden Hu, MD
(Associate Professor of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine and Associate Professor of Microbiology, Sackler School of Biomedical Graduate Sciences)
has begun an unconventional study examining whether xenodiagnosis
(the feeding of uninfected Ixodes ticks on infected animals)
can be used to determine when persistent infection occurs in humans.
Xenodiagnosis has been used for other difficult to diagnose diseases such as Chagas disease and
can sometimes definitively identify the presence of an organism in animals where other techniques cannot.
Whether xenodiagnosis is effective in humans is unknown.
This two-year project seeks to test the utility of xenodiagnosis for identifying persistence of B. burgdorferi, the spirochetal bacteria that cause Lyme disease, after antibiotic treatment of the disease.
Dr. Linden's team will test subjects with elevated C6 antibody levels or persistent symptoms after antibiotic therapy and patients with Lyme arthritis.
Evidence that B. burgdorferi can be identified by xenodiagnosis after antibiotic therapy in subjects with continued symptoms would
significantly change the current paradigm for potential mechanisms of disease and provide researchers and clinicians with a novel tool for identifying patients with persistent infection."
Posts: 571 | From Massachusetts | Registered: Oct 2008
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bettyg
Unregistered
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dreams,
please copy your entire post and post in ACTIVISM too about these lyme grants; big thanks for finding and posting them
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