I ’m excited to report that the first study using information from MyLymeData has just been published in the medical journal Healthcare.
Using patient-reported outcome data from 3,900 people enrolled in MyLymeData, we looked at how individual patients vary in their responses to treatment. Finding out who responds well to which treatments—and then learning more about those people—is an important step toward developing personalized Lyme disease treatments.
Treatment studies of patients with late or chronic Lyme disease usually take an average of how people have responded to treatment. But guess what? The average Lyme patient isn’t average! Some people improve a lot with treatment, some improve a little bit, and some people don’t improve at all. A few may even get worse.
Lyme Disease Treatment Super Responders
However, if we can identify the “super responders”—the case patients who did particularly well—and take a closer look at them, we may be able to learn things that can help other patients in a similar situation. This can help drive the development of personalized Lyme disease treatment.
For lots of diseases, such as tuberculosis, pulmonary disease, and cancer, scientists are now identifying high treatment responders, but our study is the first to use this approach in Lyme disease.
The reason it hasn’t been done before in Lyme disease is because identifying how different groups of patients respond to treatment requires large sample sizes. The largest trial funded by the National Institute of Health for patients with chronic Lyme disease enrolled just 129 people—way too small a group to look at individual treatment variation……….. Join or login below to continue reading.
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