Lyme Disease Testing

Hey everybody. In this video we're going to talk about Lyme disease testing. I'm Dr. Diane Mueller, founder of My Lyme Doc, your Lyme disease experts. And we want to make sure to dispel myths that are going on as far as Lyme disease testing. So classically what people are doing for testing is a first line of testing. It's called the ELISA test. And the ELISA test is typically when people are going in for a Lyme disease test, that's first test that typically gets run. It's kind of thought of as a standard of care problems. That problem really is that some research is showing there's up to a 66% chance of a false negative for this test. So if you fall in this very, very high false negative category, further testing is not done. Lyme disease is ruled out and the symptoms continue on. The other thing to really bring to light is even if you do make it pass that first round of testing, the next round of testing called the Western blot, the standard western blots on the market are really only looking for one species of Lyme disease. One species of the bacteria, I should say, that causes Lyme disease. Bacteria that causes Lyme disease is called, caused by a species of or a bacteria called Borrelia. And Borrelia borgdorferi Burgdorferi is the classic species of Borrelia that causes Lyme disease. And what we see is there's other types of Borrelia species that are not this Borgdorferi that can also cause Lyme disease. And so what happens for many people if they do make it to the first round of test and they make it and say that was positive and they make it to the second round, which is usually considered confirmation of that first round, probably because that first round isn't very accurate, then we run into a secondary problem. Secondary problem is if you happen to be bitten by an insect that carries a type of bacteria, type of Borrelia that is not Borgdorferi, it's not going to spike that test, that test is not going to show positive. And you could have Lyme disease, you could just have Lyme disease caused by a sister species of Borrelia and not the classic Borrelia borgdorferi. So there's several places that tests can go wrong. The third place is even if you do have a positive test on the first round, you do the follow up test on the second round called the Western blot. The next thing that can go wrong is even if you do see if that, that Borrelia that is in your body is Borgdorferi. The way the interpretation goes for the second round of testing is you have to have quite a few markers to show positive for that test to actually be a positive test. So that test is called a Western blot. And with that test is really looking. Is looking to see how your immune system is responding to proteins. They're called antigens that are from the Borrelia bacteria. And so classically, for many years, we thought that you would have to have quite a few of these proteins, actually have your body have an immune response to them in order to say it was a positive test. One of the problems is that we now see that some of these proteins are highly specific to Lyme disease. They're highly specific to Borrelia, meaning there's not other microorganisms on the market. There's not other microorganisms in nature, I should say, that could actually create these proteins. And so those of us that are well versed in Lyme disease are really looking to say, well, if you have an immune reaction to a protein in your body that Lyme and only Lyme, that Borrelia and only Borrelia contains, why do you have to have multiple of these present? And so the Lyme test is really only as good as the test that is ordered, as well as the clinician that is interpreting that task. And so if you've had Lyme testing done and somebody has ruled this out, but you're reading online, you have a lot of symptoms and it just sounds like Lyme, but definitely consider Lyme. You're looking for help in your Lyme disease and your fibro and any of your other types of diseases or symptom picture. You can find out more about the work I do at my Lyme doc in the caption below. And if this information has been helpful, please do subscribe to this channel and I look forward to hearing from you, hopefully in the future. Take care.