Is there a connection between ME/CFS and Sjogren's Syndrome? Discussion and a poll about testing

[DiBelloBr]

Worth remembering that Primary Sjögren's syndrome associated with Ro and La is not the same as Sjögren's syndrome n.o.s.. Clinical Sjögren's syndrome occurs with rheumatoid arthritis without Ro or La. It is all very confusing because primary Sjögren's is associated with rheumatoid factors too but they are of a different spectrum from those in RA. There aren't any watertight categories within all this.

At least the field is moving away from the distinction between primary and secondary Sjögren’s syndrome, toward simply referring to Sjögren’s disease, whether isolated or associated with another autoimmune condition.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

At least the field is moving away from the distinction between primary and secondary Sjögren’s syndrome, toward simply referring to Sjögren’s disease, whether isolated or associated with another autoimmune condition.

That may be so in terms of fashions at meetings and in publications. Sadly, all of this is driven by the RheumoTwitterati these days. Sjögren's disease sounds like a muddled idea. Not that I ever liked the primary nomenclature much. This is a paradigmatic situation where the popular concept of ' a disease' or 'a diagnosis' falls down because it isn't actually what medicine is about - which is using epidemiological data sets to derive prognostic information from a whole range of overlapping and interacting features for each individual person.