New research may reveal why Lyme disease causes chronic symptoms for some

Well, recent studies are providing new insights into why

some

Lyme

disease

patients suffer long-term

symptoms

. It all has to do with an immune system marker found in the blood. The breakthrough is being hailed as a major advancement in the way doctors can approach the tick.

disease

s transmitted by diseases transmitted by us, let's bring in an NBC News medical contributor, Dr. Natalie Azar, to learn more about this. Hello Dr. Azar, it's a pleasure to see you, so please walk us through this new

research

. How does this immune system marker lead to these persistent systems? How does that ultimately change our understanding? of

chronic

Lyme disease, does this help us well?

I think so and I think it's now easy for us to understand how to conceptualize what a

chronic

Lyme situation is, given all the people we know who are suffering with prolonged greed and the biggest mystery here is how

some

people develop an infection, since whether it's Covid or Lyme, they recover after proper treatment and never have persistent

symptoms

, and then there's a subset of maybe five to ten percent of people specifically with Lyme disease who continue to have persistent symptoms, so in this study of about 79 subjects, all of whom had Lyme in the central nervous system, meaning they had evidence of Lyme disease that was affecting their brain and their spinal cord, and they measured the levels of this particular protein called interferon Alpha in both the blood. and in the fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord and found that after treatment with antibiotics, the protein level decreased in the CSF and central nervous system fluid, but remained elevated in the blood. in the individuals who had persistent symptoms, suggesting that this ongoing immune reaction and inflammation was the cause of their persistent symptoms, rather than having persistent bacteria somewhere in the body, so Dracer, let's take a step back and talk about How Lyme disease develops.

They normally affect the body and what makes it so difficult to diagnose. Yes, two really very important questions. You know, many people in the medical community will understand Lyme disease if it's caught early and if you're lucky enough to have it. Classic bull's eye rash, may feel like a flu-like illness, you have some joint pain, some fever, you get antibiotics and everything completely resolves, even in a moderate case, you could even have involvement of the joints, it could affect the heart. and of course the feared complication is that you can have brain or spinal cord involvement, which leads you to know a multitude of different symptoms and, again, with proper antibiotic treatment and sometimes you know that such After two months of antibiotics, symptoms may be completely relieved. resolve, but again in that smaller subset of patients the symptoms can absolutely persist and can resemble things like fibromyalgia and with just persistent headache and brain fog and pain and it's really very difficult to treat because, again, if we don't know exactly why It's very, very difficult to target therapy towards that, yes, and this new

research

means that therapies and treatments could change for patients with longer episodes of Lyme disease.

Can you help so quickly? So the idea here is just like that instead of aiming, you know? or the mistake and giving prolonged antibiotics that may target this protein, this Alpha Interferon with some type of immunosuppressant that you know, could actually lead to an improvement in the patient's symptoms, okay, Dr. Natalie Azar, thank you very much and viewers, we are on a roll with the Close-up images of the early morning eruption and now take pictures today, so thank you for putting up with this important report. Thank you for watching our YouTube channel. Follow today's top stories and breaking news by downloading the NBC News app.