March 5, 2018 – Post Treatment Lyme

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: If you’ve had Lyme disease and are still having symptoms, what should you do? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Lyme disease symptoms may actually persist after treatment and result in an ongoing condition known as “post treatment Lyme disease syndrome,” a study by John Aucott, a Lyme expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, has shown. If you suspect such a thing is happening for you, what should you do? Aucott offers his advice.

Aucott: Work closely with their primary care physician on treatment. There’s no FDA approved treatment for this illness because we haven’t really had a chance to develop biomarkers and treatment trials so it’s the old-fashioned art of medicine. It’s called off label use of drugs because there have been no FDA approved treatments. This illness doesn’t seem to be cured by additional course of intravenous antibiotics. The few trials that have been done by the NIH looked at whether intravenous antibiotics are curative in this post treatment Lyme disease syndrome and it doesn’t look like they’re curative.  :33

Aucott notes that prompt treatment of Lyme disease remains the best strategy. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.