This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Summer is just around the corner. That is the season for hiking, the outdoors and ticking. Fortunately, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) recently Guidelines About diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease..
Lyme disease is a tick-borne infection Borrelia burgdorferi It infects humans by being bitten by a spirochete. Ixo Death Tick.
Let’s take a look at the clinical presentation. Lyme disease usually has skin lesions at the site of the tick bite. Erythema migraine (EM) lesion. Disseminated diseases can cause multiple skin lesions throughout the body, with about two-thirds having systemic symptoms (such as fatigue, joint pain, and muscle aches). headacheLyme disease, especially as it progresses, can show neurological and cardiac symptoms as well as inflammatory arthritis.
If the tick is stuck while being bitten by the tick, Get rid of mites Grasp the insertion part with tweezers or tweezers and pull. Do not burn.
Two Frequently Asked Questions
Two frequently asked questions in the office are (1) do people who have been bitten by ticks need diagnostic tests, and (2) should these patients be given antibiotic prophylaxis? There is no reason to do it. Even if they have Lyme disease, the test is probably negative in the early stages of the disease, and there is an increased risk of false positives in areas where ticks are endemic.
Second, prevention. If you are bitten by a tick, you need to ask how long the tick has been attached. If the ticks attach within 24 hours, they are unlikely to become infected. For ticks that had adhered for more than a day, one meta-analysis showed the administration of prophylaxis. Doxycycline Within 72 hours of removing the ticks, the risk of subsequent Lyme disease is reduced from 2.2% to 0.2%. Therefore, the guidelines recommend that prophylactic antibiotic therapy be given to adults and children if it can be given to adults and children within 72 hours of removing the identified high-risk tick bite. High-risk mite bites are due to deer ticks that have been attached for more than 36 hours in endemic areas. If used, prophylaxis should be a single dose of doxycycline 200 mg.
Clinical diagnosis is recommended over laboratory tests for patients with early-stage Lyme disease and EM rash with or without systemic symptoms. This is because only about 20% of people test positive for Lyme disease early in the disease that presents with EM lesions. If the lesion is atypical and the diagnosis is uncertain, an antibody test can be done. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the initial test is likely to be a false negative, so if the first test is negative, you will need to run it again about a month later.
For early Lyme disease, the recommended antibiotic is a 10-day or 14-day course of doxycycline. Amoxicillin Or Cefuroxime Axetil. They are all equally effective.7-day course if someone cannot take doxycycline or beta lactam Azithromycin Is the recommended secondary agent.
Remember: Doxycycline is generally avoided in children under the age of 8 and in pregnant and lactating women because of concerns about permanent tooth coloring. IDSA and the American Academy of Pediatrics state that doxycycline can be used in children as needed. These groups should use beta-lactam antibiotics as first-line treatment and doxycycline as second-line treatment if they are allergic to beta-lactams. Most patients use amoxicillin in the treatment of Lyme disease because doxycycline can cause phototoxic reactions and can be problematic for patients in the spring and summer.
This is important information that you should have at hand now that spring and summer are approaching.
I’m Neil Scornik, this is Medscape.
