That's not a study, it's a single case report of a single patient. It's notable precisely because it doesn't match what we see in other cases, hence the write-up.
Notably, the patient's symptoms during the persistent infection were very different than CFS. She had massive problems with different organ systems that were apparent through traditional testing.
Given case studies like this, it may be possible for Lyme to persist in certain rare situations. More study is always welcome. However, I haven't seen any real evidence that these scenarios are common without the other presentations associated with Lyme disease, as this patient experienced.
It's becoming impossible to have honest conversations about Lyme online because the chronic lyme theories have evolved on multiple levels of "but what if..." reasoning, chained together with isolated experience reports and case studies like this one. The current popular version of chronic lyme requires that we assume persistent lyme infections are hiding in ways that don't appear on traditional tests, manifest with symptoms different than typical lyme infecitons, and always stay constrained to a hidden infection below the threshold of an active infection (which is different than this case study, which clearly progressed to active infection).
These case studies are always interesting and I want to see more research in the area, but I can never square them with the popular chronic-lyme-explains-everything claims online. There are too many gaps and too many assumptions.
I also tested positive for lyme under the CDC criteria. I took the antibiotics, but after several follow ups with an infectious disease specialist associated with a local research university, I never showed IgG positive. It was ruled a false positive.
@frozenborderline did you ever test IgG positive? If you were only IgM positive but it never progressed to IgG positive, I would assume a false positive.
