Antibodies to Lyme & Bartonella species in serum & synovial fluid from people with rheumatic disease

The title cut off but it's diseases (plural)

In short:

- 27% of patients had antibodies to Lyme in their joint fluid, but only 15.5% in their blood serum. So joint fluid may be a better sample for diagnosing Lyme disease.

- For the Bartonella, the opposite was true, where 24% of patients had Bartonella antibodies in their blood serum, but only 2% had them in their joint fluid.

So basically joint fluid might be better to diagnose Lyme.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38483477/

makes a decent amount of sense given that we know

lyme likes to live in the tissues - rather than the blood - and in particular likes to digest collagen - so we would expect it to be in the cartilages of the joint and for there to be some immune activation there and in the fluid surrounding the joints

bartonella on the other hand likes to live in the blood and the cells that line the blood vessels - so given that there are very few blood vessels in the cartilages and the joint itself - we would not expect bartonella to be found there as easily

both also have mechanisms top turn off immune reactivity - so since both the two tier testing and IFA's used in that study are indirect methods ( serology) and we know this has serious limitations for detecting both of these pathogens - its only going to detect a portion of infections

overall it was interesting to see the very broad number of rheumatic conditions that people were suffering from - Osteoarthritis, Sjogren's Syndrome, CFS, cysts on tendons, calcium phosphate disposition, rotor cuff injury - and had positive tests for either Borrelia or bartonella

it reminded me of Dr SP and his book "chronic" where he postulated that many of the chronic diseases people suffer from today may in fact be caused by chronic stealth infections