Lyme disease is sometimes called a “hidden epidemic” because people living with the illness are often misdiagnosed. Since the 1970s countless stories have surfaced of people enduring a mysterious they have a different medical condition with symptoms that are similar to Lyme. The delay in a correct diagnosis can lead to years of suffering.
Lyme disease can develop when a person is bitten by a tick carrying a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. This bacteria invades every kind of tissue in the human body, including your joints, muscles, bladder and gut, brain and nervous system. The bacteria’s ability to infect all the organ systems is in large part of what makes lyme disease difficult to identify. The longer a patient goes untreated, the more widespread and varied the symptoms tend to become. The wide array of symptoms can contributed to some patients not being taken seriously, and being told their symptoms are exaggerated or psychosomatic.
Another barrier to a timely diagnosis is that tests sometimes fail to detect the disease in the first few weeks of infection because the body has not yet produced enough antibodies to trigger a positive result. Yet it is in these early stages that the infection is most treatable. The longer it goes undiagnosed, the more likely it is that the patient will severe health outcomes.
Since Lyme disease cases have steadily risen in recent years due to climate change, prompt treatment for these patients is more important than ever. As winters becomes milder and rain patterns change, ticks are staying active throughout more of the year. From 2011 to 2019, lyme disease cases increased by 44%.
For more information, see: BBC