Chronic Lyme Disease

Although most patients are successfully treated by timely anti-lyme disease therapy, such as antibiotics, still significant number of patients experience treatment failure and continue to suffer long-term, debilitating symptoms, including neuro-inflammation, pain, fatigue, refractory arthritis, allergic dysfunctions, cognitive dysfunction and other symptoms. This is known as post-treatment lyme disease or chronic lyme disease, for which the causes, diagnosis and treatment remains controversial.

More recently, it has been discovered, that chronic lyme disease can be „disguished“ as Mast Cell Activation Disease. Mast cells are activated as the healthy immune response to the lyme disease infection, for example by borrelia burgdorferi. In some cases, although the lyme disease inducing bacteria have been depleted and with that the actual initiating trigger has been removed, still the lyme disease symptoms prevail, potentially caused by still chronically activated mast cells in tissues, organs and brain. This chronic post-infectious mast cell over-activation causes a wide spectrum of devastating symptoms which are very similar to the symptoms of mast cell activation patients. Further, the intensive use of antibiotics to treat the lyme disease in many patients leads to a disturbed intestinal permeability resulting in an increased uptake of antigens that stimulate mast cell activation, and amplifies the systemic chronic activation and potential accumulation of mast cells.

The hypothesis that based on a polygenic and epi-genetic pre-disposition for mast cell activation (prevalent in about 10 to 15% of population) a lyme disease can prevail and lead to a chronic mast cell activation seems more and more obvious given the fact that not only the symptoms of chronic lyme disease patients and mast cell activation patients are very similar, but often also the elevated mediator levels and triggers for symptom worsening are similar.

Although antibiotic therapy cures most lyme disease patients, a significant proportion of patients continue to suffer persisting symptoms that can derail normal life significantly including complete disability. A recently published study estimates the projected number of post treatment chronic lyme disease patients in the United States to reach 2 million patients by the year 2020.

Our individual mast cell activation inhibition treatment could potentially significantly effectively treat and prevent post treatment chronic lyme disease.

SCIENTIFIC SOURCES
  1. Talkington J, Nickell SP. Borrelia burgdorferi spirochetes induce mast cell activation and cytokine release. Infect Immun. 1999;67(3):1107–1115
  2. Allison DeLong, Mayla Hsu, Harriet Kotsoris: Estimation of cumulative number of posttreatment Lyme disease cases in the US, 2016 and 2020, BMC Public Healthvolume 19, Article number: 352 (2019)