Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Development Of Improved Diagnostic Tests For Lyme Disease, Ezdehar Ghazal

NYMC Student Theses and Dissertations

Laboratory diagnosis is very critical for early treatment of Lyme disease, as Lyme disease could be difficult to diagnose because of vague symptoms or the confusion with symptoms from other illnesses. Previously, the standard two tiered-testing (STTT) was the traditional testing for Lyme disease with two different lab testing methods, Enzyme Immunoassay (EIA) as the first-tier test and immunoblot as the second-tier test to confirm the diagnosis. However, western immunoblotting had a poor sensitivity of <50% for early Lyme disease and high costs. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the use of a modified two tiered-testing (MTTT) which was cleared by The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in which EIA can be used instead of western immunoblotting.

In this study we followed a recent multiplexed paper-based immunoassay study for early Lyme disease serodiagnostic testing by using an Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) …