Johns Hopkins Launches First Ever Center to Focus on Lyme Disease

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Johns Hopkins is launching the first ever Lyme Disease Clinical Research Center that will explore the causes and possible cures for the disease that infects approximately 300,000 people and costs an estimated $1.3 billion each year to treat.

After the discovery of disease in Lyme, Connecticut about 40 years ago, the disease has spread quickly throughout the East Coast and Midwest.  Today, it infects approximately 300,000 people each year and has become one of the most reportable infectious diseases in the United States.

The new center is supported by a major gift from the Lyme Disease Research Foundation and plans an ambitious research program to target this common disease that already costs the health care industry approximately $1.3 billion to treat.

"If you live anywhere from Maine to Virginia, it's almost impossible for Lyme disease not to affect someone you know, someone in your family or yourself," says center founder and director John Aucott, a Johns Hopkins internist.

Aucott, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, has already spent a decade studying the disease and its potentially crippling effects.

Spread by ticks infected by the bacterium Borrellia burgdorferi, the disease is passed to humans when bitten by ticks.  Infected people will often develop flu-like symptoms such as swollen glands, fatigue, rashes and body aches.  In most cases, people respond well to treatment with antibiotics.  However, one out of every five or six patients go on to develop post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, sometimes referred to as chronic Lyme disease, that is marked by extreme fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, arthritis-like pain in the joints, and cognitive, neurological, and cardiac symptoms.

"This syndrome is not fatal, but it is life-altering," says Aucott. "People who come down with Lyme disease are active people who have the bad luck to be bitten by an infected tick while they're out hiking, camping, or mowing the grass. It can happen to anyone anywhere there are trees, deer, and the ticks that they carry."

Aucott has received a grant as the new director to lead the first prospective controlled study of the affect of Lyme disease on the immune systems of infected patients and their long-term health.  The aim of the study is to understand why some patients develop long-term symptoms post-treatment that last for months or even years, while others do not.

The Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Clinical Center will act as a central hub for future exploration of Lyme disease as well.  Securing funding in the future for the center will be critical to ensure that this research is able to continue.