From the LymeLight Newsletter of the Lyme Disease Foundation

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If so, should you later experience symptoms that could be Lyme-related without the possibility of becoming re-infected, do not worry, the antibiotics almost certainly eradicated the LD bacteria from your body, regardless of how long you were infected before treatment.

The symptoms you're experiencing are because you are getting old. You just think they're Lyme symptoms because you've heard previous reports, riddled with hyperbole, that detail a wide array of physical and mental impairments you can get from the disease.

Of course, in some cases it is possible an ailment is responsible for the symptoms you're experiencing. If so, what you need is another diagnosis to find the actual cause of your symptoms. After all, you only had LD.

Convinced?

Hopefully not, but a recent study hailed as one of the few studies that examine "the long-term health of patients diagnosed with Lyme" deceptively concludes that long-term mental or physical abnormalities in Lyme patients are uncommon.

"Long-term Outcomes of Persons with Lyme Disease," published in a February edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concludes that people who receive conventional therapy for LD return to just as good health as people who never had the disease. The study observed 678 patients for up to 11 years and focuses on cases reported to the Connecticut Department of Health from 1984-91.

While 69% of the patients reported an increase frequency of joint pain, fatigue and headaches, most patients, the study says, attributed the symptoms to aging or other illness such as a stroke. According to the study, the frequency of symptoms was similar to that of a control group of people not diagnosed with the disease.

The study, however, has a number of flaws that make it hard to accept its conclusions:

1) It examines mainly patients with early LD. Roughly 88% of the patients who met the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) narrow surveillance criteria had the classic, telltale, bull's eye Lyme rash or multiple Lyme rashes. Therefore, it is likely these patients received timely diagnosis and antibiotic treatment. No patients in the study exhibited late-stage symptoms such as encephalopathy (any dysfunction of the brain) or encephalomyelitis (acute inflammation of the brain or spinal cord). These are the patients most prone to treatment failures and long-term health problems from LD.

2) The data was collected not by a trained health professional but by a research assistant asking questions over the phone using a symptom history questionnaire that has no established reliability or validity. No patients underwent physical examination.

3) Although the majority of patients felt they were cured of LD at follow-up, 25% of the patients who met the LD surveillance criteria and 37% of those who did not were still uncertain whether or not they still had the disease.

4) Contrary to the conclusion by one of the study's authors, Eugene D. Shapiro, MD, the study DID NOT find persons who have had Lyme to be just as mentally and physically healthy as persons without Lyme. A 212 person subset from the 678 patients, matched against 212 healthy controls, revealed Lyme patients had an increased incidence of joint or muscle pain (33.5% to 24.1%), fatigue (19.3% to 14.6%), and ability to formulate ideas (11.3% to 3.8%). The study also found patients experienced increased difficulty with memory, exercise, naming objects, and judgment.

A recent study published in the LDF's Journal of Spirochetal and Tick-Borne Diseases (JSTD) examines a patient group largely ignored by many researchers and clinicians: patients with chronic LD that experience cognitive deficits despite receiving 4-16 weeks of intravenous antibiotic therapy.

That study, conducted by LDF scientific adviser Brian Fallon, found repeated antibiotic therapy can be beneficial among patients who have been previously treated, and even with patients who tested negative on Western blot. Patients treated intravenously showed the most functional and cognitive improvement.

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