Sjögren’s Disease Care: Diagnosis and Management Considerations

ReachMD Announcer:
You’re listening to 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 considerations for diagnosing and managing Sjögren’s disease.

Here’s Dr. Carteron now.

Dr. Carteron:
With Sjögren’s being such a heterogeneous and diverse disease and thinking about how to manage it and what the treatment strategies are, the first part is making an accurate diagnosis. Not all people who have dryness or some of the Sjögren’s antibodies have Sjögren’s. They may have other things. It’s really starting with, as best as one can, being sure that Sjögren’s is the leading diagnosis that a patient’s had.

Then it’s really assessing the characteristics that that individual patient has. There’s not just one size fits all. And then once you kind of assess what the domains are—or we often refer to it as phenotyping an individual patient—that helps risk stratify. So knowing, are we dealing with primarily the fatigue and a dryness component, or are we also dealing with a major organ that is involved at that particular time, like the lungs or cardiac or gastrointestinal systems? So the management strategies are going to really depend on what that first level of subsetting and phenotyping a patient is.

And then once you see where a patient is at that point in time, then you can work out a management strategy. Some of that will primarily be lifestyle management: seeing if there are things in their diet or lifestyle that they have any control over that they can help manage, and if there are co-existing reasons that somebody may have certain symptoms, managing that. And then the other end of the spectrum, at least from where I sit, what I’m looking at is what things could a patient be at risk for that you could help to prevent further progression or damage.

ReachMD Announcer:
That was Dr. Nancy Carteron talking about the unique processes for diagnosing and treating 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!