Chronic-peristant viral infections?

for what its worth i think there is overdiagnosis of chronic viral infections in people with lyme

this diagnosis is usually based on serologic tests based on antibodies -

the reason being there is documented cross reactivity between antibodies to lyme proteins and viral proteins - eg EBV and Borrelia cross reactivity is very well documented - but other members of the herpes family viruses - which include CMV are often mentioned
your test was LTT - but i think the same principles apply - and lymphocytes can confuse the same proteins - this is much less researched as the LTT is very little used in conventional medicine.

then there are the true viral reactivations - i think these do happen - just not as often as serology suggests - and when they do i think they are essentially a symptom of a disturbed immune system - rather than the main cause of it. remember all of these viruses are things that our immune systems normally deal with just fine - but remain in our bodies in very low numbers for life ( all herpes virus family members do this ) so if they are replicating again its a sign the immune system is un balanced and that begs the question - by what ?

when lyme is in the picture or suspected to be - its the prime candidate or this - as it is known that lyme destroys the germinal centres in the lymph nodes - which is where the immune cells are trained to recognise pathogens - and this is a global effect affecting all pathogens - not only borrelia. so thsi could well be enough to allow viruses to start replicating again.

some LLMD's do treat people with high viral titres with long term antivirals - but we dont know if the antivirals are actually treating lyme and bart or something else ( recent FDA screen have shown strong antibacterial activity for some of the common antivirals )
in any case they are generally rather harsh drugs and taken long term - so if it were me i would want to be pretty certain i was really treating an active viral infection before embarking on this track.

to this end - any virus replicating in high enough numbers to make a person sick really should show up easily on PCR test - so i would do that first for CMV

Note - we have had members here in the past with very high titres for the related herpes family virus - EBV who were certain they had reactivated EBV infections - but when tested they have had negative EBV via PCR

so my perspective is - in short - that viral reactivation is largely a "red herring"

hope its of some help

Viral reactivation does happen. It wasn't my main issue, but it did happen. For me, it was not EBV, but zoster (shingles/chickenpox) and whatever causes mouth sores.

This was how I unexpectedly discovered that valtrex kills borrelia.

I also got covid a few times, probably because of my immune system being overworked dealing with other things.

I'm not sure how helpful PCR would be. The cause can be various viruses, so you'd need to do many different PCR tests.