Ticks transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which is thought to infect about 300,000 people every year in the United States. About one in ten of those infected will develop a condition called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS) after being treated for the disease. It causes fatigue and brain fog.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine used brain scans to show that PTLDS patients have high levels of a marker of inflammation in the brain. The findings were reported in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
“There’s been literature suggesting that patients with PTLDS have some chronic inflammation somewhere, but until now we weren’t able to safely probe the brain itself to verify it,” said one author of the report Jennifer Coughlin, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine..
Source: Hopkins Medicine
