I finally had the opportunity to sit down and read Dr. Steere's editorial which accompanied Nadelman et al's study, "Differentiation of Reinfection from Relapse in Recurrent Lyme Disease". Before I comment on the editorial, I want to acknowledge the research which was accomplished in the study as it deserves more attention.
I think it was an interesting study on two counts:
One, it showed that in a group of 17 patients, it was highly unlikely that a patient would get reinfected with the same genotype of Borrelia burgdorferi compared to one with which they'd previously been infected. Does this suggest that patients have some form of immunity to specific genotypes - or is this a reflection of random chance of infection with specific genotypes?
Two, it provided evidence in two patients that a person can be infected with one genotype of Borrelia burgdorferi in skin - while an entirely different genotype can be found in the blood. The significance of this has yet to be determined, but it does raise some interesting questions about the nature of Borrelia burgdorferi infection. How often are patients coinfected with different types of Borrelia burgdorferi? Are these genotypes competitive in any way? Can one genotype affect a patient more profoundly than the other? If there is a delay in treatment, can one genotype be more effectively treated than another?
The findings from this study inspire curiosity and more questions about the nature of Lyme disease.
Thoughts on the editorial, "Reinfection versus Relaspe in Lyme Disease"
Now that I have acknowledged two interesting findings from the Nadelman reinfection study, I have to say that unlike the connections made by Dr. Steere, I do not see the relationship between data presented in this study and patients who have been infected with Lyme disease and continue to have persisting symptoms after initial treatment.
Any good study and its findings stand on their own and an editorial on them by the authors themselves is usually unnecessary. The work should speak for itself, and I think this study does well to demonstrate a relationship between the presence of new genotypes and reinfection in a small group of patients who were bitten by ticks in the same geographic location.
If there is an editorial accompanying research, it should in some way enhance or broaden our understanding and appreciation of the findings - and by extension, lead our curiosity to new horizons.
Unfortunately, Dr. Steere's editorial is not additive in nature. It does not add nuance to or a greater appreciation of the reinfection study - nor does it address the kind of questions raised above which directly apply to his study. Instead, his editorial seems to stretch the findings' significance in order to provoke discussion on chronic Lyme disease based on claims that a small percentage of patients' erythema migrans rashes have been thought to indicate a relapsing infection.
References
Robert B. Nadelman, M.D., Klára Hanincová, Ph.D., Priyanka Mukherjee, B.S., Dionysios Liveris, Ph.D., John Nowakowski, M.D., Donna McKenna, A.N.P., Dustin Brisson, Ph.D., Denise Cooper, B.S., Susan Bittker, M.S., Gul Madison, M.D., Diane Holmgren, R.N., Ira Schwartz, Ph.D., and Gary P. Wormser, M.D. Differentiation of Reinfection from Relapse in Recurrent Lyme Disease. N Engl J Med 2012; 367:1883-1890November 15, 2012DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1114362
Allen C. Steere, M.D. Reinfection versus Relapse in Lyme Disease. N Engl J Med 2012; 367:1950-1951November 15, 2012DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe1211361
ALSO, to read my detailed report on the Nadelman reinfection study, see:
http://campother.blogspot.com/2012/11/what-does-reinfection-study-have-to-do.html
This work by Camp Other is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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