Patients with LD suffer a variety of clinical symptoms, including rash (erythema migrans), headache, arthritis, fatigue, myalgia, and neurocognitive dysfunction.  LD associated glomerulonephritis may occur but is considered an uncommon problem.  We studied 85 urine specimens from diagnosed LD patients using UMF, specifically to see if there were urine fingerprints associated with LD infection. We were able to distinguish the LD UMF fingerprint as statistically different (p <0.001) from the UMFs of ESRD and bladder cancer. When comparing LD-positive patients against healthy volunteers, the UMF urine screen performed with 86.7% for overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV), respectively.

When considering patients with ESRD and bladder cancer in the LD-negative group, these values were 88.7% (accuracy), 83.3% (sensitivity), 91.0% (specificity), 80.7% (PPV), and 92.4% (NPV).

Additional advantages to the Rametrix® UMF™ urine screen include that it is rapid (minutes per analysis), is minimally invasive, requires no chemical labeling, uses a low-profile, off-the-shelf spectrometer, and is inexpensive relative to other available LD tests. (Senger, R, Sayed Issa, et al)