Interstitial Cystitis and Borrelia burgdorferi

Excerpt

To the Editor: Interstitial cystitis, a chronic idiopathic inflammatory disease of the lower urinary tract, is a distressing and emotionally debilitating clinical problem of unknown cause (1). The disease occurs in both children and adults but is most often seen in persons 30 to 50 years of age. Both men and women are affected although 90% of the cases occur in women, supporting one hypothesis that interstitial cystitis is an autoimmune disease (2).

One of us has recently reported (3) on the efficacy of culturing Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis, from the urinary bladder of experimentally infected