What do the Bands mean?

Hello out there,
Just diagnosed with lyme last week with 8 out of 10 IgG bands positive. I am confused as to what the bands actually mean. I know some are more significant than others and I seem to be positive for those. I know IgG means past infection. But Do the more bands you have the more serious condition it is? Does that make it harder to treat? Easier to treat? Or ultimately does it really matter?
Also does anyone else have high blood pressure? Mine has been super high at around 170/90 and Im a small woman who is not overweight and I eat super healthy.
Thanks for Any help!!!!!!!!!

Ah ok makes sense. So not necessarily 'Worse' than less bands?

cariyogi said...
Hello out there,
Just diagnosed with lyme last week with 8 out of 10 IgG bands positive. I am confused as to what the bands actually mean. I know some are more significant than others and I seem to be positive for those. I know IgG means past infection. But Do the more bands you have the more serious condition it is? Does that make it harder to treat? Easier to treat? Or ultimately does it really matter?
Also does anyone else have high blood pressure? Mine has been super high at around 170/90 and Im a small woman who is not overweight and I eat super healthy.
Thanks for Any help!!!!!!!!!

Hello,, I had Hight BP early on and left it unchecked for 1week and ended up with 120/220 and hospitalized for a week. I was lucky I did not stoke out.

Please get to a MD and get your BP under control. Lyme will impact a weak organ like a Kidney and cause BP spikes. Not sure if your MD will agree but that doesn’t matter ,, they should take getting you to a normal range a top priority.

Once you deal with the Lyme , which can take awhile, you’re BP will drop and you can start to back off your meds.

Please do not delay in getting into a doc very soon.

Need to run but I’ll answer any questions you have on BP ams lyme.

cariyogi said...
Thank you for the information. Makes sense! I do have a great LLMD. Any Idea what co infections could cause high blood pressure?

I think Bart from Anxiety will cause spikes and Bor/Lyme from being in your kidney.

After spending 6 months to try to understands why I needed to increase my BP meds 5 fold, I learned 2 things.

The condition of your heart and cardiovascular system do play a role in hypertension. However its more your kidney function.

For me after a battery of tests, turns out I have a 50% blocked renal artery. Under normal conditions that Kidney can easily still manage my BP. However, add an lyme or co infection and it’s too weak, inflamed, or overloaded with infection toxins to function normally.

Western blot is a way of separating proteins based on size exclusion and testing their identity with antibodies. The polyacrylamide gel is like a matrix. Think of running through a forest with a big load of stuff in your hand. The more stuff you have sticking out to the sides the more trees you're going to bump into, the slower you're going to move. Whereas if all you're carrying is a small trinket you can be quite agile

So in essence, a laboratory strain of borrelia is ground up into bits and run through the gel. It's proteins are separated by size so that they can be individually viewed. kD stands for kiloDalton which is a measure of mass. So band 41kD means the protein that is determined to be 41kD. So in the case of borrelia we know that the 41kD protein is the flagella. So if the patients blood binds to that protein it means they have antibody against borrelia flagella. So the more bands you have the more your antibodies are binding to different borrelia proteins, the more likely it is that you have borrelia. You can't use just one or two because other bacteria might have similar proteins and so your antibodies may cross-react with borrelia even if it was another bacteria that triggered them.

Anyways, more bands does not mean more ill. It doesn't mean anything useful really. Maybe that your strain of borrelia is more like the reference standard than someone else. Maybe that you just have more circulating free antibody in the blood. Maybe that the stage of infection at which you took the blood sample the bacterias protein expression more closely mirrored that of the reference. Who knows.

Anyways we need to kill this myth that IgG means past infection. I've heard patients say it. I've heard doctors say it. But it's simply wrong. IgG means the infection is not recently acquired. That is all. It doesn't tell you whether it is ongoing or cleared.