March 7, 2019 – PET and Post-Lyme

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Anchor lead: Would PET scans be helpful for people with post treatment Lyme disease syndrome? Elizabeth Tracey reports

PET scans may be helpful in assessing people who still complain of Lyme disease symptoms months or years after treatment, so-called post treatment Lyme disease syndrome, or PTLDS. That’s because PET scans can visualize a protein associated with brain inflammation, according to work by Jennifer Coughlin and colleagues at Johns Hopkins.

Coughlin: I can imagine that down the road, as we refine our imaging techniques, we could incorporate the imaging into our clinical diagnosis and potentially use it to really inform the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. A precision imaging approach to identify which patients with post treatment Lyme disease syndrome have that inflammatory process and might respond best to an immune modulating therapy.   :31

Coughlin notes that PET scanning may also be able to assess the effectiveness of treatments. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.