Intestinal bacteria could give doctors an objective test for chronic Lyme disease – News@Northeastern
Fatigue, muscles aches, brain fog—are these symptoms of chronic Lyme disease, or merely side effects of the daily grind of human existence? It’s hard to tell.
Chronic Lyme disease, also known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome or PTLDS, is incredibly hard to diagnose because symptoms vary greatly, and there is currently no biological test to detect the disease.
Now, Kim Lewis, University Distinguished Professor of biology and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern, has proposed a new way to objectively diagnose this elusive disease by analyzing the microbes in a patient’s gut.
Unlike acute Lyme disease, which is diagnosed when a patient tests positive for an immune response to the tick-borne bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, PTLDS is essentially diag...