This is a handy little book which covers everything you need to do know (and then some) about Sjögren’s syndrome. It is split into nine sections:
- Epidemiology, genetics and disease burden
- Diagnosis and clinical assessment
- Oral features
- Ocular features
- Fatigue, pain and quality of life
- Systemic (extra glandular) features
- Evidence-based evaluation and therapies
- Lymphoma: Pathogenesis, prediction and therapy
- Case studies
Each section is written by a different author ranging from professors of rheumatology or medicine, to clinical scientists, specialist trainees and a consultant ophthalmologist for the ocular feature section.
It’s a surprisingly easy to read book considering that the topic may seem somewhat…dry. Awful dad jokes aside – it is actually very useful. Each chapter starts with a ‘Key points’ box which gives a quick summary of that section; helpful if you want to know if that chapter will be helpful for you. What I particularly liked is how well the book talks about clinical trials. The authors talk you through why that study was important in a sentence or two, and then goes on to describe why it’s relevant clinically. They also make excellent use of tables to present data, e.g. when describing biological therapies there’s a great table summarising open labelled studies done and what their key findings were.
One of the highlights for me is when the authors describe a tool which can help to grade the disease, and most of the tools are actually within the book, e.g. the ocular surface disease index score is in full in table 4.2. When there are a large number of tools available, e.g. to grade fatigue, they aren’t in the book, but they do have a table telling you which ones are available and how they differ.
Another nice addition is within the section Systemic Features authored by Elizabeth Price. Below each sub-section there’s a ‘practical tip’ whereby she suggests how to manage this feature and when and how to investigate further.
The book ends on a case study section where we can see all the advice within the book in action, helping to consolidate everything that you’ve read.
The book is easy to navigate and although there’s a lot of information that perhaps isn’t as relevant to those of us in the ophthalmic profession it’s definitely useful and worth a look through. It’s also a good one to share with your medic friends too.
