Flares and Cell Growth Cycle: Questions
My question concerns symptom cycles, appearance of symptoms every four weeks.
J.J. Burrascano writes in his essay "Managing Lyme Disease":
"It has been observed that symptoms will flare in cycles every four weeks. .... If the antibiotics are working, over time these flares will lessen in severity and duration."
My wife has neuroborreliosis. Some of her symptoms flare in cycles, but not all do. The cycles were most pronounced in the beginning of the disease, before she received effective antibiotics.
(She started with 4 weeks intravenous Ceftriaxone (Rocephin, 2 g/day ), followed it up with 4 weeks oral Doxycycline (400 mg/day), 3 months oral Cefuroxime (Ceftin, 2 - 5 g twice a day) and 3 weeks ago I have started another iv Ceftriaxone treatment (Rocephin, 2 g/day ))
Now severity (of pain) of symptoms has decreased, also the number of days in a row during which she feels symptoms (the duration of the flare) has decreased. The number of days between the beginning of one cycle to the beginning of the next is 25 ... 31 days for many symptoms, as before treatment. But some symptoms never seem to have shown these cyclically appearing flares.
I wonder if - for microbiological reasons - all Bb related symptoms need to show cyclical flares, the cycle length being the Bb cell growth cycle, as Burrascano writes. The bacteria growth cycles would then be synchronized by an external (host based) or internal (Bb based) "clock", all Bb cells dividing at the same time. An analogy would be the annual growth cycle of vegetation, the synchronizing clock being the earth's climate.
This would then imply a valuable consequence: Symptoms that do not come in periodic flares are probably not Bb related. May be those are responses of the body to the stress the disease as a whole puts on us.
Do most of your symptoms appear with such a fixed period and only a few are present continuously?
Joachim Gruber
Joachim Gruber
Date: May 28, 1998