For some patients who have Lyme disease (LD), nonspecific symptoms can persist after treatment and impair quality of life. Estimating the frequency and duration of such symptoms is challenging. Using commercial insurance claims data from 2017-2021 for enrollees residing in states where LD is common, we identified 24,503 case-patients with LD and matched them (1:5) with 122,095 control-patients with other diagnoses by demographics, medical service date, and inpatient/outpatient setting. We compared relative frequencies of diagnosis codes for pain, fatigue, and cognitive difficulties between case-patients and control-patients in the year after diagnosis. Those symptom codes occurred 5.0% more frequently among case-patients than among control-patients and comprised »11.0% of the total symptom codes among case-patients. Symptom code frequency among case-patients declined significantly in the 6-12 months after LD diagnosis and reached levels similar to control-patients by the end of the year, with the exception of fatigue.
Nawrocki et al. (Wed,) studied this question.