ReviewDiagnostic microbiology and infectious disease2017
Studies that report unexpected positive blood cultures for Lyme borrelia - are they valid?
Review in Diagnostic microbiology and infectious disease, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Persistent Symptoms After Treatment of Lyme Disease.Infectious disease clinics of North America · 2022Review
- Lack of Convincing Evidence That Borrelia burgdorferi Infection Causes Either Alzheimer Disease or Lewy Body Dementia.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2022Article
- Laboratory Diagnosis of Lyme Borreliosis.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2021Review
- Novel targets and strategies to combat borreliosis.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2020Review
- Challenges in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Lyme Disease.Current rheumatology reports · 2020Review
- Critical analysis of a doxycycline treatment trial of rhesus macaques infected with Borrelia burgdorferi.Diagnostic microbiology and infectious disease · 2018Article
- Better drugs for Lyme disease: focus on the spirochete.Infection and drug resistance · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Positive blood cultures for Lyme borrelia have been well documented in untreated patients with early Lyme disease. In this report we review the validity of three studies that reported the recovery of Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato from the blood of a high proportion of patients for whom no evidence was presented, and no claim was made, that the patients had untreated early Lyme disease. In two of the studies the patients had been treated extensively with antibiotics for Lyme disease before the cultures were obtained. Critical evaluation of the three reports suggests that they are invalid. Indeed, two subsequently published studies could not reproduce the results of one of the reports. In a published analysis of another of the reports, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that the cultures were likely to have been contaminated. When the biologic plausibility of recovering borrelia from blood is extremely low, the level of scientific rigor required of a study that claims a positive result should be particularly high.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.