Concerned Mom

There will be people coming along to read the Western blot better than I do. As you may have read the 41 and 39 do come up quite often the 18 I don’t remember too much about.

the IgG and IGM differences are about timing if I remember correctly.

Speaking of timing, did you visually see an attached tick? What are the symptoms? and the last question- how long ago between those and when the test was taken? - that’s kind of an important question.

If the blood draw was taken soon after the possible tick bite or if it was way too long, say a year, test results can be inaccurate.

Like I said others will answer who know more about this than I do.

Post Edited (astroman) : 12/8/2022 9:08:11 PM (GMT-8)

Yes, those are pretty common Lyme symptoms. Northwest Wisconsin is known in particular for being lyme country.

Her symptoms suggest babesia, which is a common infection that ticks transmit along with Lyme. Recommend you get an LLMD who treats all the infections and follows ILADS guidelines.

You can make another post to ask for references for doctors in your area: “Looking for LLMD near ___.”

Wisconsin has a lyme association- do a goggle search. They might help for finding drs.

How does the IgG and IGA differ again though? Someone out there knows that’s kind of important

But her IgG and IGM contradict each other. Between those two, Band 41 says positive and negative that’s why I’m asking.

With some tested antibodies like in candida, they can use these to determine a time window - of past and current infections.

After googling IGm is the first to develop IgG can take a long time. I see that’s kind of what you said.

———————
When measuring your immune system in general

- immunoglobulins IgG and IGM ;those are in different places and for fighting off different types of pathogens and infections. Those are the ones that I’m chronically low in which is why I’m guessing if anyone is chronically low on those they may have low antibody response to any test that measures antibodies.

I’ve never seen a study for long-term limeys who took both a detailed Western blot and immunoglobulin immune cell specific tests. If they were low in the immunoglobulins in general. That might explain why they test negative in a Western blot Lime test.

There should almost be a different post on Latter half of my post under the dotted line,I don’t think there ever has been, Possibly in a long long time If ever.

Post Edited (astroman) : 12/10/2022 2:59:51 PM (GMT-8)

lyme disease doesn't really follow the old rules which people used to interpret IgG and IgM results

Here is a bit more detail on IgM vs IgG in lyme:

the lyme disease organism has the largest genome of any bacteria so far discovered.

the large majority of this extra genetic material is dedicated to making different outer surface proteins

this enables it to change the proteins it has on its outer membrane - this is important as these are the ones the immune system is in contact with and trying to make antibodies to, which takes time - maybe 1 month and are initially IgM antibodies ( it later learns from these IgM antibodies what to make IgG antibodies to )

by the time the body has figured out what proteins to make antibodies to the organism has changed the proteins in the outer membrane and now looks like a new infection to the immune system - and so off the immune system goes again, trying to make new (IgM) antibodies to that - and so the cycle continues.....

you can see what an effective an immune avoidance mechanism this is - as the body never quite catches up to the microbe with its learned immunity.

you can also see how this would result in IgM antibodies being present on an ongoing basis in chronic infection. something many people here report.

it is not always this way however - as the organism also has other immune disrupting strategies and one of these is it interferes with the body’s ability to make antibodies at all - and so we instead tend to see a somewhat randomised picture of: no antibodies, only IgM antibodies or a random mix of IgG and IgM antibodies on western blots.

overall its worth noting that sensitivity is the main issue with serologic tests
and as a result the studies show false negatives are something like 5-10x more common than false positives
its quite common to have less than the full suite of bands on western blots/immunoblots and negative ELISA's

either IgG or IGM indicate past exposure - either together with symptoms point towards current active infection