Patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) are more likely to be diagnosed with hypertension than the general population. In addition, one-third of patients with pSS have high cholesterol. Despite the presence of these risk factors for cardiovascular (CV) disease, few studies have investigated the prevalence of major CV events in patients with pSS.
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Elena Bartoloni, MD, a researcher at the University of Perugia in Italy and colleagues recently published the results of their retrospective analysis of patients with pSS in the Journal of Internal Medicine.1 Theirs is the first cross-sectional study to investigate the prevalence of CV disease risk factors in a large cohort of patients with pSS (1,284 female and 59 male) compared with age-matched healthy women (n = 4,774). The mean disease duration from diagnosis in the cohort was 5 ± 6 years. Most patients (n = 794) had a documented minor salivary gland biopsy. Xerophthalmia was the most commonly reported symptom of pSS, followed by xerostomia.
The investigators demonstrated that older age and longer disease duration were associated with an increased risk of total CV events, such as cerebrovascular events and myocardial infarction. They found that 5% of patients reported at least one clinically overt CV disease.
Patients in the pSS cohort smoked less than the general population and had a lower prevalence of obesity and diabetes than the control group. The pSS cohort had a higher prevalence, however, of hypertension and hypercholesterolemia.
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