Connecting the Dots: Recognizing Systemic Clues in Sjögren’s Disease

ReachMD Announcer:
This is Living Rheum on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Nancy Carteron, who’s a Health Sciences Clinical Professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Optometry, and a Co-Investigator of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Autoimmune and Immune-Mediated Diseases Program. She’ll be discussing barriers to diagnosing Sjögren’s disease.

Here’s Dr. Carteron now.

Dr. Carteron
Patients can present to different subspecialty care providers, and they may not be connecting the dots to a more global condition. A patient may present with dry eyes to their eye care professional. Well, there are a lot of different reasons that people can have dry eyes. It’s not all Sjögren’s. And so if somebody’s not asking questions about a more systemic disease, it just may continue to be focused on dry eyes. Same thing if patients are presenting with unusual dental cavities or recurrent swelling of their parotid glands. If somebody’s not connecting the dots—“Oh, could this be Sjögren’s?”—it may be treated as an infection of the salivary glands, for example.

I think it’s just one, a general awareness across the board. Two, it’s being a bit more of a detective in connecting unusual dots or just asking more probing questions for patients. But I think certainly now with the ease of access of medical information via the internet, often patients will come in and say, “I wonder if I could have…” “And that raised the question…” “And my doctor then ordered these tests.” And being at a more specialized referral center now, it’s often the patients that are connecting the dots initially.

ReachMD Announcer:
That was Dr. Nancy Carteron talking about the diagnostic challenges of Sjögren’s disease. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Living Rheum on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!