New, Dedicated Sjogren's Syndrome Treatment Clinic at Johns Hopkins-Bayview

JHU has established a new Sjogren's center at their Bayview Hospital in East Baltimore, MD. It's a brand new clinic designed to provide one-stop care (dental, ENT, OB, ophthalmology, neurology, and rheumatology) in a single office. It has a primary research aim of better defining Sjogren's (I think with the goal of making it a disease rather than a "syndrome") and exploring issues like the weird neurological changes and pain issues that can happen in Sjogren's patients.

I visited yesterday and met with the neurologist on staff, Dr. Julius Birnbaum. He is excellent. He spoke recently at one of the recent Sjogren's Syndrome Foundation patient conferences - his talk covered neurological complications of Sjogren's. Among other things, his research team has identified some component in blood (a gene? a protein? an antibody? I'm not sure) that is high in Sjogren's patients with peripheral neuropathy.

I have also been treated by the director, Dr. Alan Baer, at other Hopkins facilities in the past. He is excellent also - he's the lead rheumatologist for the new clinic.

They are accepting new patients (local or out-of-town), although I expect them to get overloaded pretty quickly with people like us! If you are interested in making an appointment, full instructions are at this URL:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/rheumatology/clinics/sjogrens-center.html