Can Lyme Disease Cause Psychiatric Disorders?

Lyme disease is no small health threat to persons living in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and northern California. True, the first signs of its onslaught are usually no more than flulike symptoms. But it is also capable, over the long haul, of inflicting a variety of other physiological insults—say, muscle pain, arthritis, heart inflammation, severe headache, stiff neck, or facial paralysis.

Now a new study adds one more malady to that list: psychiatric illness.

The study was conducted by Tomá Hájek, M.D., a psychiatry resident at the Prague Psychiatric Center in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues. It is reported in the February American Journal of Psychiatry.

There were several reasons that Lyme disease piqued the interest of Hájek and his colleagues. For one, Lyme disease is the most frequently recognized anthropod-borne infection of the central nervous system in Europe, as well as in the United States. Second, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease—Borrelia burgdorferi—belongs to the same family as does the bacterium that causes neurosyphilis. Around 1900 neurosyphilis accounted for some 10 percent to 15 percent of psychiatric hospital admissions, but because of penicillin treatment, it is now an uncommon disorder. And third, anecdotal reports have suggested that Lyme disease can lead to psychiatric consequences—say, mood changes or depression. Psychiatric News

I’ve written before about what has essentially been an Inquisition directed against those who claimed there is an insidious chronic outcome of some Lyme Disease infections, with prominent neuropsychiatric consequences — both the patients seeking recognition of and treatment for these effects and the medical personnel who sought to treat them. But there are both compelling theoretical and clinical lines of evidence, for those not wearing blinders, suggesting the need for this paradigm shift.