Lyme Disease Arthritis

Lyme disease is basically an infectious disease and is spread by tick bites. The ticks may either be a deer tick or western black legged ticks. The ticks bite animals and humans.

Lyme disease is spread when a tick carrying the bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, bites humans and attaches itself to the skin for more than 36 hours.

This disease was first identified in Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975 when mothers of several children living in the same area started reporting with rheumatoid symptoms in their children. Though first it was misdiagnosed as unrelated cases of Rheumatoid arthritis, later on doctors investigated the cause and found out that this was a new disease and was caused and spread by bite of the deer ticks. It was named as Lyme disease in 1982.

Symptoms:

The first symptom is that of a rash at the site of the tick bite. The rash has a typical bull's eye appearance with the outer rings being more red and dark as compared to the inner rings.

Next come the flu like symptoms and patients have generalized body pains, headaches, muscular aches and low grade fever. But these symptoms can take 3 days to over a month to develop after the tick bite.

If these seemingly harmless symptoms are left untreated they can eventually progress to more severity with involvement of the nervous system and the loco motor system.

More serious symptoms are more of a toxic variety with wide spread involvement of the neurological and loco motor systems. The patients may present with pain and swelling of the joints, disorientation, lack of muscular co-ordination, palsies, lymphocytic meningitis, motor or sensory radiculitis, myelitis or encephalitis.

Diagnosis:

The diagnosis is by the clinical symptoms and also by a serological blood test., which detect the anti bodies to the spirochete- Borrelia burgdorferi.

Skin biopsy may be needed in differential diagnosis of any similar disorder.

Treatment:

Antibiotics like Doxycycline, Amoxicillin, and erythromycin and in neurological complications, cephalosporin group like intravenous cefotaxime may be given.

The most important fact about the treatment is that the earlier a patient receives antibiotics, the lesser will be the complications and slower will be the progress of the disease.

Doxycycline is very effective in the initial stages and can control and limit the progress of the disease if given within 72 hours of onset of fever and rash after a tick bite. This fact may be quite significant for people who are living in highly endemic areas.

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