Dr. John Keilp, senior neuropsychologist at the Columbia Lyme Center, reports a "fingerprint" of neurocognitive Lyme disease
November 14, 2018
Dr. Keilp and colleagues discovered that the cognitive profile of patients with post treatment Lyme disease is meaningfully different from the profile of patients with major depression. This is a neurocognitive biomarker or fingerprint of post-treatment Lyme disease. Although both groups might have fatigue and mental fogginess, the Lyme group more often reports problems with verbal memory and verbal fluency while the depressed (non-Lyme) group more often reports slower processing speed and poor attention. These results highlight the value of neurocognitive testing in helping to tease out the potential causes of cognitive problems in patients with post-treatment Lyme disease.