Effective today, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics core clinical chemistry laboratory will being running assays for Lyme Disease antibodies and Helicobacter pylori IgG antibodies.

For the Lyme Disease testing, we will continue offering options for acute disease (less than four weeks from onset of disease symptoms) or chronic disease as was offered previously with mailout testing.  The CDC does not recommend performing Lyme IgM Western Blot testing on patients with signs or symptoms of greater than 30 days’ duration, rationalizing a different approach to confirmatory testing for acute and late disease.  No testing is recommended for patients with erythema migrans.  Testing detects infection caused by both European and North American strains of Borrelia.

Testing will be run Monday through Friday on the evening shift.  All three tests use red top (serum) tubes.  Other details on the tests are as follows:

Test name	Epic #	Reflex if positive*	Reference range (antibody index)
LYME DISEASE AB - ACUTE DISEASE	LAB7769	Western blot IgG and IgM	IgG:     Negative: < 0.20     Positive: 0.20 or greater IgM:     Negative: < 0.12     Equivocal: 0.12 – 0.31     Positive: 0.32 or greater
LYME DISEASE AB (LATE DISEASE)	LAB7770	Western blot IgG	IgG:     Negative: < 0.20     Positive: 0.20 or greater
HELICOBACTER PYLORI ANTIBODY, IGG	LAB158	None	Negative: < 0.75 Equivocal: 0.75-0.99 Positive: 1.00 or greater

*Reflex for positive or equivocal Lyme tests are referred to reference laboratory for Western blot analysis.  For the acute panel, if either IgG or IgM screen is positive, there is automatic reflex to Western blot for IgG and IgM.

Questions should be directed to Matthew Krasowski, MD, PhD, medical director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory (384-9380, matthew-krasowski@uiowa.edu).