Lyme disease cases are exploding Symposium calls for faster tests, diagnoses BY CARRIE MACMILLAN REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN HARTFORD — The word “epidemic” does not capture what is happening when it comes to Lyme disease, said Dr. Tom Moorcroft on Tuesday at a symposium in the Legislative Office Building dedicated to the disease. “Last year, Dr. Paul Mead from the CDC said the center’s estimates may be 10 times less than the number of cases. More than 300,000 cases of Lyme disease are diagnosed each year,” said Moorcroft, who practices osteopathic and integrative medicine in Berlin. “We might get closer to 1 million new exposures a year. And compare that to 50,000 new cases of HIV/AIDs each year.” Moorcroft was one of several physicians who spoke at the symposium and rallied for faster and more accurate testing and diagnosis for Lyme and related diseases. The event, believed to be the first of its kind in the area, was organized by the Coalition Against Lyme and Related Borrelioses (CALRB), a Hartford-based nonprofit formed earlier this year to disseminate evidence- based information about developments in diagnosis of Lyme and similar diseases. Approximately 50 people attended. “If we look at cases of Lyme from 1991 to 2006, we see cases going up. Is it increased reporting or increased incidence?” Moorcroft asked. “We are not sure, but our patients are getting sicker and it’s a concerning trend.” In Connecticut, there were 2,111 confirmed cases in 2013 and 814 probable cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That puts us fourth per capita in the country, and the Northeast is a hotbed of activity,” Moorcroft said. Other speakers included Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist at Milford Hospital who uses DNA sequencing to test for Borrelia burgdorferi, the infectious agent for Lyme disease, and Borrelia miyamotoi, the infectious agent of a similar illness. Lee’s lab can produce a diagnosis within five days. “Lyme disease is a complex disease that is caused not just by one organism,” Lee said. The test Lee uses checks for two diseases and is highly sensitive to detecting them, Moorcroft said. That is important, experts say, because Lyme disease-like borrelioses do not have a set of typical symptoms and may not show up in the most widely used Lyme tests. The widely used commercial test for Lyme, which was introduced in the 1980s, is a two-step process of checking blood for evidence of antibodies against Lyme disease bacteria. The test, Moorcroft said, misses 88 out of 200 cases of Lyme and takes a few weeks to obtain a result. HIV testing, by comparison, misses one out of every 200 cases, he said. “If we missed 88 cases of HIV, there would be a public outroar, which there should be, but why don’t we have the same outroar for Lyme?” Moorcroft asked. Furthermore, the correct time to test for Lyme is unknown, he said. “We have ideas, but we don’t know. We might need to test someone three or four times before getting a positive result,” he said. Dr. Richard Horowitz from Hyde Park, N.Y., said the current commercial test falls short because there are many Lyme-like syndromes that are not reliably found by it. Dr. Katherine Lantsman from Boston agreed, and detailed a number of patient cases in which the two-step testing showed negative results for Lyme, but the DNA test out of Milford showed positive results, even years after a patient’s original infection. “Clearly, this lab is giving us a tool to make better diagnoses,” Lantsman said. The two-tier test now used “was great technology in 1994, but practitioners and scientists will admit that there is a high rate of false positives and false negatives with it,” said Kevin Moore, president and executive director of CALRB. “Our organization was designed to have a scientific/ medical bent, which is not being done. There is a lot of this kind of work in a patient/victim-friendly way, but this is to raise the bar and push progress to find the most conclusive tests that are out there that can detect disease at its earliest stages.”
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 22:00:01 +0000