Detection of Antibodies in Late Lyme Disease

As the geographic distribution and variety of atypical presentations of Lyme disease have become more fully appreciated, the clinician has become more dependent on serologic information to identify patients with Lyme disease. Unfortunately, when these tests are used in areas of sporadic occurrence of Lyme disease and with atypical clinical syndromes, the likelihood of false-positive results increases. In addition to the expanded use of available assays, there has been a rapid increase in the variety of commercial and research methods used to detect antibodies to Borrelia burgdorferi . We evaluated the consistency of results among several of these methods when used with a population from northeastern Illinois.