Girgis Alexander A, Cimbro Raffaello, Yang Ting, Rebman Alison W, Sewell Thelio, Villegas de Flores Daniela, Vadalia Aarti, Robinson William H, Cox Andrea L, Darrah Erika, Soloski Mark J, Aucott John
Lyme Disease Research Center, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Front Immunol. 2025 Jul 9;16:1607619. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1607619. eCollection 2025.
Post-treatment Lyme Disease (PTLD) is a poorly understood complication of infection with significant patient morbidity. Characterized by fatigue, generalized myalgias, and cognitive impairment, PTLD symptomatology closely resembles long COVID and other post-acute infection syndromes. While prior studies suggest immune dysregulation as a factor in PTLD pathogenesis, the mechanisms underlying its heterogeneous presentation and severity remain unclear. To associate symptom burden with discrete immune phenotypes, we applied factor analysis to self-reported symptom data from 272 PTLD patients to generate patient subgroups. We then immunophenotyped peripheral blood cells of these individuals and 28 healthy controls through 19-parameter flow cytometry and cytokine profiling to associate PTLD status and the newly defined subgroups with specific immune states. Our PTLD cohort had fewer circulating CXCR5+ CD4+ naïve T cells relative to healthy controls (5.2% vs. 8.3%, Padj < 0.001). These cells were positively associated with musculoskeletal pain in PTLD participants, but not healthy controls. This and additional immunophenotypic alterations, including an increased prevalence of CXCR3+ CCR4- CCR6- CD8 T cells (43.1% vs. 25.7%, Padj < 0.01), permitted the creation of an elastic net classifier which identified PTLD with moderate efficacy (AUC 0.83). Measurement of cytokines did not reveal associations with PTLD and did not improve the performance of the model. While we could not identify immune features which distinguished all patient subgroups, we did observe a female-specific increase in central memory CD8 T cells restricted to one high-fatigue patient subgroup. Additionally, factor analysis revealed multiple associations between immune cell frequency and the severity of specific symptoms. Collectively, our findings add to growing evidence of immune dysfunction as a prominent feature of PTLD.
治疗后莱姆病(PTLD)是一种了解不足的感染并发症,会给患者带来严重的发病情况。PTLD的症状表现为疲劳、全身肌痛和认知障碍,与长期新冠及其他急性感染后综合征极为相似。虽然先前的研究表明免疫失调是PTLD发病机制中的一个因素,但其异质性表现和严重程度背后的机制仍不清楚。为了将症状负担与离散的免疫表型联系起来,我们对272名PTLD患者的自我报告症状数据进行了因子分析,以生成患者亚组。然后,我们通过19参数流式细胞术和细胞因子分析对这些个体以及28名健康对照的外周血细胞进行免疫表型分析,将PTLD状态和新定义的亚组与特定免疫状态联系起来。与健康对照相比,我们的PTLD队列中循环CXCR5 + CD4 + 初始T细胞较少(5.2%对8.3%,校正P值<0.001)。在PTLD参与者中,这些细胞与肌肉骨骼疼痛呈正相关,但在健康对照中并非如此。这一发现以及其他免疫表型改变,包括CXCR3 + CCR4 - CCR6 - CD8 T细胞患病率增加(43.1%对25.7%,校正P值<0.01),使得我们能够创建一个弹性网络分类器,该分类器识别PTLD的效能中等(曲线下面积为0.83)。细胞因子测量未发现与PTLD有关联,也未改善模型的性能。虽然我们无法确定区分所有患者亚组的免疫特征,但我们确实观察到中央记忆CD8 T细胞在一个高疲劳患者亚组中存在女性特异性增加。此外,因子分析揭示了免疫细胞频率与特定症状严重程度之间的多种关联。总体而言,我们的研究结果进一步证明了免疫功能障碍是PTLD的一个突出特征。
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