Shocking: Only 1 in 3 Doctors Can Identify These Ticks!

Have you ever had difficulties identifying a tick? Doctors also had difficulties identifying a tick according to a study by Lago and colleagues.
Using high-resolution photographs of ticks, the authors surveyed 115 health care providers, which included primarily medical students, medical residents, and physicians. The survey was simple. Each health care provider was asked to look at high-resolution color pictures of ticks provided by the University of Rhode Island Tick Encounter Resource Center. (The dimensions of each image were 1 5/8 inches by 2 inches.)
The participants were asked to select one of 5 possible answers for each photograph:
American dog tick
Deer/ blacklegged tick
Lone Star tick
Brown dog tick
“I do not know”
Only 1 in 3 ticks were correctly identified.
The survey participants correctly identified 60% of the non-engorged black-legged ticks but only 34% correctly identified a partially engorged black-legged tick. “Likely explanations are that texts and media rarely show partially engorged ticks,” the authors explain.
Additionally, “the color contrast seen between the scutum and abdomen in the blacklegged tick, for example, is lost after 2.5-3 days of engorgement.”
Participants had more difficulty identifying the other tick species:
1 in 2 participants identified a non-engorged Lone Star tick;
1 in 3 identified a non-engorged American dog tick;
1 in 4 identified a non-engorged adult Brown dog tick.
The number of ticks correctly identified was worse for partially engorged ticks.
Medical students and non-physician health care providers (i.e., nurses, physician assistants) fared the worse with only about 1 in 4 correctly identifying the ticks. In everyday practice, health care providers do not view high-resolution photographs of ticks. Their experience, instead, is with actual ticks which appear much smaller.
“In addition to choosing the easier-to-identify female ticks for our test, we also chose adult rather than nymphal ticks for the quiz,” the authors explain. “Nymphal ticks, in addition to be being smaller, tend to have more muted colors and less distinctive markings on their scutums.”
In actual practice, it’s important that health care providers can identify engorged ticks. Yet, the survey shows that engorged ticks were more difficult for providers to identify.
Laga AC, Granter SR, Mather TN. Proficiency
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