[SarahO]

Klempner also found that the NARCOLEPSY haplotype is associated with chornic Lyme!!!

But this was the first sig finding regarding tissue types and Lyme disease.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7...RVAbstractPlus

EXCERPTS:
Infect Immun. 1993 Jul;61(7):2774-9. Links

Association of treatment-resistant chronic Lyme arthritis with HLA-DR4 and antibody reactivity to OspA and OspB of Borrelia burgdorferi.

Kalish RA, Leong JM, Steere AC.
Division of Rheumatology/Immunology, New England Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02111.

Chronic Lyme arthritis that is unresponsive to antibiotic therapy is associated with an increased frequency of the HLA-DR4 specificity.

We conclude that the combination of the HLA-DR4 specificity and OspA or OspB reactivity is associated with chronic arthritis and the lack of a response to antibiotic therapy.


UNQUOTE

The Klempner discovery was caught on tape by a Lyme patient at a lecture he gave regarding his study. I hvae heard the tape recording.

From Kathleen Dickson: Mark Klempner found that a large number
of Chronic Lyme patients, seronegatives, have the HLA-DQB1*0602 haplotype that is correlated with narcolepsy. He talks about it during
talks to physicians. Here's what he says-


Mark Klempner:

"Um, some people will view this as bad news, some will view it as good
news, and some people will say, well, where do we go from here?? I
think that really is the question, really is to coalesce and say,
?where do we go from here?


Um, There, these patients obviously, are very, very much interested in
that question, as we are, and I just want to highlight a preliminary
piece of data of where we think we?re going from here, unpublished*,
and not for large, uh, dissemination, but here is the preliminary
data.


And, that is, that when you look for the possibility of an autoimmune
disease, the best way to look is to see if there is any genetic
clustering in HLA haplotypes. The reason for that is the way antigens
get presented in the context of who you are, that is, your HLA
haplotype. And we can talk in some detail about that. Those diseases
that I think everybody would agree are so called Autoimmune :lupus,
rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, and perhaps MS, have some clear
genetic clustering that leads us to believe that these are indeed
autoimmune diseases, although we do not satisfy so-called
co-postulates of autoimmune disease that we?ve written about. And the
odds ratio for your having that particular HLA type, in the case of
R.A, a DR4, or a DQB0602 to protect you from type 1 diabetes, are on
the order of 3 to 6. One of the ones that is probably highest, of
course, is B27, in patients with alkyloiding spondolytis and the like.
It turns out that if you look at the first 51 patients with
post-treatment chronic Lyme disease, the patient population that
participated in our study, there was a very high incidence of DQB0602
with an odds ratio of 770%. So it may well be that exposure to THAT
organism with THAT background of HLA haplotype may lead you to develop
chronic symptoms. That is a hypothesis that needs to be tested. It
would obviously lead to an entirely new form and approach to therapy."