A lack of correlation between the incidence of lyme disease and deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease
Open accessAbstract
Reports that Lyme disease (LD) causes Alzheimer's disease (AD) have appeared in academic journals and online. If the biological agent Borrelia burgdorferi that causes LD also causes AD, then areas with the highest levels of LD should have significantly higher numbers of deaths due to AD compared to low LD areas. Here we show there is no statistically significant correlation between the incidence of LD and deaths due to AD in the US. Furthermore, the 13 states with the highest deaths due to AD were statistically different (p < 0.0001) from those with high LD incidence.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the US, the 13 states with the highest incidence of Lyme disease have the lowest incidence of AD.
“In the US, the 13 states with the highest incidence of Lyme disease have the lowest incidence of AD [66].”
From What would it take to prove that a chronic infection is a causal agent in Alzheimer’s disease? (2025) · cites this paper as [66]
The Results (page not provided) say that only 7 of the 13 states with the highest Lyme disease incidence were among the 13 states with the lowest incidence of deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease—not all 13. The paper measures AD deaths rather than AD incidence generally. (LLM, conf=0.92)
Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
What would it take to prove that a chronic infection is a causal agent in Alzheimer’s disease?
Brutkiewicz, R. R., Cao, W., Morgan, D., Reis, R. S. D., Suryadevara, V., Willette, A. A., Willette, S. A., Wyatt-Johnson, S. K., & Duggan, M. R. (2025) · Trends in Neurosciences · doi:10.1016/j.tins.2025.05.009 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- O'Day, D. H., & Catalano, A.
- Affiliations
- Department of Biology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada
- City College of New York (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Alzheimer's Disease
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-08-11
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 115-118
- ISSN
- 1387-2877 (ISSN-L)
- 1875-8908
- OpenAlex
- W1903819665
- Cited by
- 16
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 10 · 2018: 1 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 0.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Alzheimer s Disease (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Immunology and Microbiology › Parasitology › Vector-borne infectious diseases
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Alzheimer's disease research and treatments
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research
- Keywords
- Lyme disease, Alzheimer's disease
- MeSH terms
- Alzheimer Disease, Cause of Death, Humans, Lyme Disease, United States, Incidence
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
