Lupus and Lyme Disease

Has anyone here developed Lupus after having long term chronic Lyme Disease?

No, I have not tested for autoimmune diseases. Are there reliable tests available for these diseases? I read up on Lupus a little bit, and it sounded like there is not really a test to confirm you have it. It sounds like Western Medicine only diagnoses you with Lupus if you have a set of symptoms that are common.

ravenhome777 said...
Has anyone here developed Lupus after having long term chronic Lyme Disease?

just about every auto-immune disease will have been diagnosed in people with long term lyme disease

reasons for this are several:
*lyme disease is known as "the great imitator" - can mimic the symptoms of just about every disease out there - incl lupus

*lyme disease definitely does cause many auto-immune disease - there are high rates of several of the common ones in the lyme population - hashimotos, arthritis, Sjogrens, high ANA test result is also v common in this population.

there is a great deal of symptoms overlap between Tick born diseases and Lupus - and people often get false diagnosis of Lupus when in fact its just the effects of Lyme / co - infections

for these reasons i don't think you can self diagnose lupus with any confidence based on symptoms
and where lyme is in the picture - and symptoms resemble lupus - a false positive result for lupus is always a high probability - so you need to be extra careful reaching hsi conclusion

especially as it may take you away from treating infections - which if you have lyme are the likely root cause of symptoms - and towards immune suppressive treatments for Lupus - which have serious long term health risks associated with them - along with serious risk of making your overall lyme disease picture worse - by suppressing the immune system and its ability to control the disease.

my advice would be:
do not assume -see a LLMD for differential diagnosis - get the appropriate tests to gain more data / and minimise guesswork - beware conventional doctors auto-immune diagnosis when Lyme is in the picture - proceed with great caution

Lupus and lyme disease can mimic each other. And infection can also trigger lupus. Can be very hard to tease one from the other, but unlike some other autoimmune diseases, lupus tends to be a bit easier to diagnose, from what I've seen.

Serologically, the ANA marker will often be positive. As will dsDNA antibody (but not always). Complements C3 and C4 will often be low, as well as the WBC. But most importantly, some typical symptoms like photosensitivity and/or a malar rash will be present, in addition to some non-specific complaints like fatigue and joint pain. Obviously not everyone has all of these clues, but often there are enough to make a clinical diagnosis.

There are some great drugs, particularly Benalysta, which is a very very mild immunosuppressive with few side effects, that many claim is a gamechanger for Lupus, so worth exploring a diagnosis, if that is what you think you may have.

Not just ANA positive, but it’s the percentage (wrong term) of it that matters for lupus diagnosis. It’s another deeper ANA blood test.

I had this tested when I was ANA positive, this second test said NO.

Feel free to correct me with the name of this second step of ANA testing.

And againn, I most all lupus patients have the butterfly face rash apparently.

dcd-

It was very simple and nothing new.

Do ANA first.>...
positive? >
then another ANA that gets a decimal number with it.

Its where this decimal is that matters to Drs.

I had a post on this about 3 years ago.

I think it was Quest Labs, maybe this is only something they do, not sure....

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My ANA cleared up. This is prob from hashimoto.

Im guessing I have other autoimmune things going on (rare ones), good luck finding them since Drs only do the well known ones.

The 5-10% of mystery patient illnesses dont matter apparently. (we all know thats the truth !!)

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That panel your mentioning looks very helpful. I dont think I have a Dr willing to do that anymore. I wore them out or out of insurance range. Functional MD's that used to take insurance got pushed out by insurance companies the last couple years. Now $300-500 per hour, no thanks. . Im not willing to spend much more on remaining mystery symptoms.

Post Edited (astroman) : 10/28/2022 11:01:52 AM (GMT-7)

Yep, titter.thanks. I was 1:80, then it went away again.

I prob should do that again though. I think a PCP will do it, normal cheap test.