Dr. Paul Lantos, Associate Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine), recently headed development of a multi-society guideline for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. The recommendations were published online in November 2020 and January 2021 and appear in the journals: Clinical Infectious Disease, Neurology, Arthritis Rheumatology, and Arthritis Care & Research. The Infectious Diseases Society of North American (IDSA) asked Lantos to chair this new guideline project because of his established research expertise with tick and mosquito-borne disease.
These evidence‐based clinical practice guidelines were developed by a multidisciplinary panel representing IDSA, the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), and the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).
“This is a disease that lots of specialties see, so that is why it was so helpful to have representation from different societies,” says Lantos.
Nine years in the making
The previous IDSA Lyme disease guideline was published in 2006. Lantos tells us their work has taken about nine years to complete.
“It took many years to go from initially forming the panel to actually getting this in print,” Lantos says.
The authors first created a list of topics for which they thought the readers of the guidelines would want formal recommendations. They [MOU5] [CI6] produced recommendations for each research question and graded the strength of the evidence based on the data that was available.
“In the end, the important thing is that we used a recognized and accepted methodology to identify and grade our evidence.”
The scope of this guideline includes prevention of Lyme disease, and the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease presenting as erythema migrans, Lyme disease complicated by neurologic, cardiac, and rheumatologic manifestations, Eurasian manifestations of Lyme disease, and Lyme disease complicated by coinfection with other tick‐borne pathogens.
Lantos also was also a co-author on the Diagnosis and Management of Babesiosis guideline that was published simultaneously.
The guidelines
Click the links below to see the 4 Lyme disease guideline publications on PubMed.