Oral parameters for the diagnosis of Sjögren's syndrome

Agreement is probably world wide in the medical profession that patient history is the most relevant part of the patient examination, but at the same time the most demanding part because there is no substitute to lack of knowledge and experience. These form the basis for an often subconscious process of selecting the most important pieces of information to help in decision making. We describe a stepwise forward discriminant analysis with a jackknife-validation in analysis of questionnaires as to diagnosis of Sjögren's syndrome. The second topic of current interest, also due to the need of generally acceptable criteria for diagnosis and classification, is the place of labial salivary gland (LSG) biopsy in such sets of criteria. In the histopathological part of our work we describe findings of a postmortem LSG study from the coroner's office.