That Showed That 10–30% of Ss Patients Suffer from Atd

[3, 4]. However, most of these results had been published before the AEC for SS were established. Two of the largest studies used European Classification Criteria (ECC) for SS. In one of the studies, the prevalence of ATD in SS patients was 20% [5]. Another follow-up study found ATD to be more frequent in the SS patients than in the controls (30% vs 4%) [6]. AEC were used to diagnose SS in the present study. Our finding of 13.2% ATD among SS patients is comparable to the results of Biro et al. [7], who also used AEC for diagnosing SS. They found that the prevalence of ATD was 10%. We found a significantly higher prevalence of ATD in sicca subjects than in SS patients and HS (P< 0.01). Although ATD is a common diagnosis in clinical practice, the prevalence of ATD is not known in our country. On the other hand, we found no difference in the frequency of clinical features of sicca syndrome between SS patients with ATD and sicca subjects with ATD (P> 0.05). Based on similar clinical findings, ATD could be misdiagnosed as SS, and vice versa. Therefore the symptoms of dryness should always be given serious consideration as possible signs of either SS or ATD (sometimes both). High prevalence of ATD in sicca subjects suggests that all subjects with sicca symptoms should be screened for ATD.