Lyme Disease
 

Carrying on my epidemiological travels, or is it travails, through Parkinson's, I come to Lyme Disease.

To measure the correlation between Parkinson's and Lyme Disease, I used the following data:
- Parkinson's prevalence data supplied by Rick (to whom my thanks), based on a chart in "Shaking Up Parkinson's: Fighting Like a Tiger, Thinking Like a Fox" page 125, Lieberman;
- a map showing for each state the total number of Lyme cases reported by CDC between 1990 and 2010 (which I normalized to state population size):
http://module.lymediseaseassociation.net/Maps/#

The correlation is -0.07 which is, essentially, zero.

I'm suprised: there is much on the web (but relatively few academic papers) linking the two diseases. See, for instance, the excellent article by Pamela Weintraub:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...sease-part-one

John