ISCN 2020: Dr. Sergio Azzolino – The Neurological Manifestation of Lyme Disease

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Dr. Freddys Garcia – Hello, my name is Dr. Freddy Garcia, and today we are joined by Dr. Sergio Azzolino. Dr. Azzolino is presenting at this year’s International Symposium in Clinical Neuroscience, taking place on May the 22nd through the 24th of 2020 in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Azzolino, thank you very much for joining us. I have a very specific question for you. I wanna know what topic you chose to present on this year, and why did you choose it? Dr. Sergio Azzolino – First of all, Dr. Freddys, thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited about presenting at ISCN. It’s proven to be a fabulous conference over the years, and so I’m very humbled and honored. My presentation Is going to be on the prevalence of Lyme disease and associated coinfections in people with traumatic brain injuries I think this is an extremely important topic, especially for our learners. There is no doubt that we are second to none and have been trained at the highest level in the diagnosis and rehabilitation of traumatic brain injuries, but through my 25 years of practice, I started seeing some patients that were not responding as well as we’d like them to respond to wonderful things that we were taught from Dr. Carrick, and so we started investigating things a little further. As we started looking at a variety of different infections and toxins, and a variety of different possible factors for these people not healing well, we identified that a very large number, upwards of 35 to 38%, were positive for Lyme disease. Proven to be a big game changer for us, because not only do these people continue to have symptoms of brain fog and visual sensitivity and poor balance and coordination, all the various things that we all know so well that patients have with traumatic brain injuries, but they have these typical symptoms that we can also see in Lyme neuroborreliosis. So for our clinicians, often times we think that all of the individual symptoms and signs began after the traumatic brain injury, but possibly they may have some underlying infections like what we’ve discovered that need to have some specific treatment. So we’re gonna talk about how to identify these things. What are the better treatments for it? It doesn’t take away from anything that we do as functional neurologists. It just adds much more to our materium. I think it’s gonna be something that’s extremely relevant for what we now all do on a daily basis, so I’m looking forward to that. Dr. Freddys Garcia – Perfect, and you are absolutely correct. We all recognize how difficult it is to work with Lyme disease and patients who are suffering from traumatic brain injuries as well, so any way that you can contribute to our clinical skills in helping those patients is gonna be of great value. Thank you very much for your time today. Dr. Azzolino. Dr. Azzolino is presenting at this year’s ISCN, May 22nd through the 24th of 2020 in Orlando, Florida. We will see you there.