Lyme IgM Band 23 details

This is one of the individual protein bands checked on a Lyme disease confirmatory Western blot (immunoblot) test, IgM class, run after an initial antibody screen comes back positive or unclear. IgM bands tend to appear earlier in the course of infection than IgG bands, so a positive IgM result (meeting the standard scoring criteria) is more suggestive of a recent infection, though IgM results are generally considered less specific and are interpreted more cautiously, especially later in an illness.