Effective
October 2015, International Lyme and Associated Disease Society (ILADS)
is proud to announce that a summary of their guidelines is now
available on the National Guideline Clearinghouse website.
The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC), a federal database that provides treatment information to health care professionals and insurance companies, is
an initiative of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ),
under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In June 2014, NGC adopted the definition of a clinical practice
guideline developed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and revised its
inclusion criteria to more closely align with this definition.
Guidelines must now satisfy these criteria to be represented on NGC.
ILADS’s peer reviewed guidelines were accepted to be summarized on the
NGC website because they met the revised inclusion criteria.
ILADS
is the first organization to issue guidelines on Lyme disease that were
developed in accordance with the IOM standards. The document provides a
detailed review of the pertinent medical literature and contains the
first set recommendations for Lyme disease based on the Grading of
Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) process.
This rigorous review format is also used by many other well-respected
medical organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO), the
American College of Physicians, and the National Institute for Health
and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK. ILADS guidelines are the only
Lyme disease guidelines that included a patient from the Lyme community
as an author or as a member of the guidelines development panel.
To access these guidelines: https://www.
In February 2016, the
National Guidelines Clearinghouse removed the Infectious Disease
Society of America (IDSA)'s Lyme disease treatment guidelines from its
website for failure to comply with regulations that require treatment
guidelines to be reviewed and updated every 5 years. After several
notifications and failure to comply, the IDSA's outdated treatment
guidelines were removed from the federal database. No updates hvae been
submitted at this time. For more information about this, please visit: https://www.