Health Care Providers

Diagnosis, Treatment and Testing

Guidance for Clinicians: Recommendations for Patients after a Tick Bite pdf icon[PDF – 2 pages]
Feeling Worse After Treatment? Maybe It’s Not Lyme Disease
Treatment
Two-tier testing explained
Tests that are NOT recommended (including CD₅₇, urine antigen testing, etc.)
Tickborne Diseases of the United States: A Reference Manual for Health Care Providers, Fifth Edition (2018).
- Print or save the Tickborne Diseases of the US: A Reference Manual for Health Care Providers, Fifth Edition (2018) Print only versionpdf icon[PDF – 52 pages]
- Order hard copies for your office.
- Online version (replaces the app)

Learning Tools

Videos

Recognizing Lyme Carditis
CDC Expert Commentary, January 2014

PCR for Diagnosis of Lyme Disease: Is It Useful? An update on testing for Lyme disease is provided in this commentary from the CDC.
CDC Expert Commentary, June 2012

Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness -- When a Bull's-Eye Rash Isn't Lyme Disease
CDC Expert Commentary, March 2013

The illustration depicts the likelihood of false positive and false negative test results based on the prior probability of a disease occurring in a given population.

Understanding Test Results for Infectious Diseases

The illustration depicts the likelihood of false positive and false negative test results based on the prior probability of a disease occurring in a given population. Clinicians should consider the likelihood of disease before performing laboratory testing. The likelihood that a patient has a disease depends on many factors:

Has a patient been in an area where the disease is found?
Does the patient have signs and symptoms typical of the disease?
Does the patient have risk factors for contracting or developing the disease?

In populations where disease is rare or unlikely, testing is likely to lead to false positives more frequently than true positives.

Download this figure in high resolution pdf icon[PDF – 1 page]

Continuing Medical Education for Clinicians

A free, CDC-sponsored Clinician Outreach and Communication Activity (COCA) course helps providers learn to properly identify and treat tickborne diseases (CME/CNE/CECH available): Little Bite, Big Disease: Recognizing and Managing Tickborne Illnesses.
The National Association of School Nurses presents an online course titled “Tick-borne Illness: Prevention, Assessment and Care”external icon that focuses on clinical care of tickborne diseases in school and camp settings. CNE is available.

Case Definition and Report Forms

Lyme Disease Surveillance Case Definition (revised Jan 2017)

Note: Surveillance case definitions establish uniform criteria for disease reporting and should not be used as the sole criteria for establishing clinical diagnoses, determining the standard of care necessary for a particular patient, setting guidelines for quality assurance, or providing standards for reimbursement.

Additional Reading

General

Halperin JJ, Baker P, Wormser GP. Common misconceptions about Lyme disease.external icon Am J Med 2013;126(3):264.

Hu LT. Lyme diseaseexternal icon. Ann Intern Med. 2016 May 3;164(9).

Stanek G, Wormser GP, Gray J, Strle F. Lyme borreliosis.external icon Lancet 2012;379(9814):461-73.

Lyme Carditis

Forrester JD, Mead P. Third-degree heart block associated with lyme carditis: Review of published cases.external icon Clin Infect Dis 2014 May 30. pii: ciu411.

Three Sudden Cardiac Deaths Associated with Lyme Carditis — United States, November 2012–July 2013. MMWR Dec 13;62(49):993-6.

Pediatrics and Pregnancy

American Academy of Pediatrics. Lyme disease (Lyme borreliosis, Borrelia burgdorferi infection).external icon In: Pickering LK, Red Book: 2012

Feder HM Jr. Lyme disease in children.external icon Infect Dis Clin North Am 2008 Jun;22(2):315-26, vii.

Walsh CA, Mayer EW, Baxi LV. Treatment of Lyme disease. Lyme disease in pregnancy: case report and review of the literature.external icon Obstet Gynecol Surv 2007 Jan;62(1):41-50.

Testing

Aguero-Rosenfeld ME, Wang G, Schwartz I, Wormser GP. Diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis.external icon Clin Microbiol Rev 2005 Jul;18(3):484-509.

Branda JA, Strle F, Strle K, Sikand N, Ferraro MJ, Steere AC. Performance of United States serologic assays in the diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis acquired in Europe.external icon Clin Infect Dis 2013 Aug;57(3):333-40.

Concerns regarding a new culture method for Borrelia burgdorferi not approved for the diagnosis of Lyme disease. MMWR 2014;63:333.

Hinckley AF, Connally NP, Meek JI, Johnson BJ, Kemperman MM, Feldman KA, White JL, Mead PS. Lyme disease testing by large commercial laboratories in the United States.external icon Clin Infect Dis 2014 May 30. pii: ciu397.

Johnson BJ, Pilgard MA, Russell TM. Assessment of new culture method for detection of Borrelia species from serum of Lyme disease patients.external icon J Clin Microbiol 2014;52:721–4.

Johnson, B.J. “Chapter 4: Laboratory diagnostic testing for Borrelia burgdorferi infection” in Lyme disease: An Evidence-based Approach, J.J. Halperin, Ed. (CAB International, 2011). Complete Article Reproduced with Permissionpdf icon[PDF – 16 pages].

Moore A, Nelson C, Molins C, Mead P, Schriefer M. Current guidelines, common clinical pitfalls, and future directions for laboratory diagnosis of Lyme disease, United States. Emerg Infect Dis. 2016 Jul;22(7).

Notice to readers: caution regarding testing for Lyme disease. MMWR, CDC Surveillance Summary 2005;54:125.

Recommendations for test performance and interpretation from the second national conference on serologic diagnosis of Lyme disease. MMWR 1995;44:590–591.

Swanson SJ, Neitzel D, Reed KD, Belongia EA. Coinfections acquired from Ixodes ticks.external icon Clin Microbiol Rev 2006 Oct;19(4):708-27.

Ongoing Research

ClinicalTrials.govexternal icon Studies of Lyme disease / “Borrelia Infections”.

Biomedical Literature

Search the biomedical literature at PubMed.

Page last reviewed: March 2, 2020

Content source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), Division of Vector-Borne Diseases (DVBD)