Home -- Symptoms -- Cycles -- Evaluation of the long-term inflammation in neuroborreliosis: Duration of therapy
"It has been observed that symptoms will flare in cycles every four weeks. .... If the antibiotics are working, over time these flares will lessen in severity and duration. The very occurrence of ongoing monthly cycles indicates that living organisms are still present and that antibiotics should be continued.This type of monitoring is customary in the therapy of e.g. HIV infections and cancer. The framework in which it is used there is the mathematical immune response model. To demonstrate the equivalence of both approaches (Burrascano's and mathematical modeling), I have....
"In general, I.V. therapy is given until there is a clear positive response, then treatment is changed to IM or po until free of signs of active infection for 4 to 8 weeks. "
The following figure describes those processes incorporated in the model. The control loop depicted with heavy lines (on the left) represents the ability of the immune system to enter self-organized feedback control oscillations the period of which is determined by parameters intrinsic to the immune system. The immune system can also oscillate with a period given by the menstrual cycle (loop drawn in medium heavy lines on the right).
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FIGURE: A simple compartment system and an immune system control scheme that produces oscillations between an inflamed state and a symptom free state. Steps 1 - 6 and states 1 - 4 are explained in detail in Fig. 10 of the draft report.
Caveat added: According to Marylynn Barkley, women with Lyme have an exacerbation of their symptoms around menses. She associates the worsening of women's Lyme symptoms with the decline of both estrogen and progesterone at the end of the menstrual cycle. (Marylynn S. Barkley, Ph.D., M.D., Associate Professor Emeritus, Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior, The University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA, E-Mail: msbarkley@ucdavis.edu, WWW: Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior (NPB)) |