World Sjögren’s Day

World Sjögren’s Day is observed every year on July 23. On this day, the Sjögren’s Foundation and other organizations join together to spread awareness about this disease, help people better understand the symptoms, and how to treat it. Sjögren’s syndrome is an immune system disorder whose two primary symptoms include dry eyes and mouth, as it attacks the cells that produce saliva and tears, as well as other parts of the body, such as the thyroid, kidneys, liver, lungs, and nerves. Other symptoms include
joint pain, skin rashes, vaginal dryness, continuous dry cough, swollen salivary glands, poor dental health, excessive thirst, and prolonged fatigue of many kinds.
HISTORY OF WORLD SJOGREN’S DAY
The first person credited with describing Sjögren’s Syndrome was Jan Mikulicz-Radecki. In 1892, he described a 42-year-old man with enlargement of the parotid and lacrimal glands associated with a round-cell infiltrate and acinar atrophy. But these criteria
often led to the disease being mistaken for Mikulicz’s syndrome. Nevertheless, this term is still used sometimes to describe the appearance of lymphocytic infiltrates on salivary-gland biopsies. Henrik Sjögren was born on July 23, 1899, in Koping, Sweden, and graduated from the Karolinska Institute of Medicine in 1927. In 1929 Dr. Sjögren met a patient who complained about having dry eyes, a dry mouth, and joint pain. While many of these symptoms were already well known, it was the combination of them that seemed odd to him, and he decided to investigate. In 1933, he published his doctoral thesis describing 19 females, most of whom were postmenopausal and had arthritis, showing clinical and pathological manifestations of the syndrome. His thesis was not well received at first, as the Board of Examiners criticized some clinical aspects. After extensive research and data collection, Sjögren published an essential paper in 1951, describing 80 patients with dry eyes, 50 of whom also had arthritis. He called the disease
‘keratoconjunctivitis sicca,’ and it began to be called Sjögren’s Syndrome in literature. Nowadays, ‘keratoconjunctivitis sicca’ is used as a scientific term for dry eyes. The Sjögren Foundation was created by Elaine Harris in 1983. She was a patient diagnosed with Sjögren’s syndrome who was frustrated by how long it took to identify her symptoms and the lack of information.

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