Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism or generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
ggm•36m ago
canadiantim•28m ago
donsupreme•21m ago
I wonder if a prolonged water fast would do the job.
kragen•18m ago
bregma•3m ago
safeimp•19m ago
kragen•16m ago
Aurornis•2m ago
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
Aurornis•10m ago
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
canadiantim•6m ago
Aurornis•3m ago
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
Aurornis•20m ago
The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.
Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.
This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.