A Possible Association Between Sjogren's Syndrome and MS

Sjogren's syndrome (SS) is an autoimmune disease directed against lacrimal and salivary glands. Diagnosis requires evidence of autoimmunity and of exocrine-gland dysfunction, but there are no universally accepted diagnostic criteria for SS. Patients with SS may have nervous system involvement, including a chronic, progressive myelopathy accompanied by brain and spinal-cord MRI signal changes and by IgG abnormalities (including oligo-clonal bands) in the spinal fluid. Thus, these patients could be misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), or they could have MS and SS simultaneously. Although most recent studies have found no association between the two diseases and found few or no patients with SS misdiagnosed as MS, these authors conducted…