Dancing with the Stars judge Carrie Ann Inaba first noticed something was wrong in her 20s. Corneal damage to her eyes, dry mouth, fatigue, brain fog, and widespread body pain began disrupting her daily life. She had no explanation for any of it.
"It's like my body was just not working," Inaba told Healthline. "All the things I could do, I couldn't do anymore. And I couldn't understand what it was."
She began researching her symptoms on her own and found they matched an autoimmune condition called Sjögren disease. When she brought this up with her ophthalmologist, she was dismissed. That experience, according to Healthline, is common among people with the condition.
"Sjögren disease…is something that people do not talk about…a lot of people don't know how to pronounce it, don't know much about it," she said.
Sjögren disease is an autoimmune disorder that targets the glands responsible for producing saliva and tears. It can also cause fatigue, pain, and brain fog. Eventually, Inaba received a referral to a rheumatologist, who gave her a formal diagnosis in 2013. She described her reaction as something that might seem counterintuitive to people who have not been through a long diagnostic process.
"I was grateful…so weird to say, but at least now I knew what I was dealing with. I knew the direction that I needed to search for more answers," Inaba said.
Nina Couette, DO, a rheumatologist and assistant professor at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine, explained why the condition is so difficult to identify. The primary symptoms, persistent dry eyes and dry mouth, overlap with many other conditions including menopause, medication side effects, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus.
"Because these symptoms overlap with so many other conditions, identifying Sjogren disease often requires careful evaluation and specialized testing," Couette told Healthline.
The delay in diagnosis can have serious consequences. By 2013, Inaba's symptoms had become debilitating, and a physical injury compounded the problem. Both forced her to stop dancing, which she describes as her first love.
"It broke my heart, honestly," she said. "I was having widespread pain throughout my body, and the fatigue was so immense. I was having so many flare-ups because I wasn't managing my health, because I didn't understand the condition."
The physical toll was not the only burden. Inaba described a mental health dimension to the illness that rarely gets discussed publicly.
"Something that people don't often talk about with Sjögren disease is the depression that comes along with it, and anxiety," Inaba said. "The uncertainty of 'When is a flare-up going to happen?' The uncertainty of, 'Do I have energy to get through the day today?' You go on a high alert when you live with" the condition.
Couette confirmed that the path from first symptoms to confirmed diagnosis can take several years. Because the condition has no single definitive early marker, and because symptoms are so commonly attributed to other causes, patients often cycle through multiple specialists before anyone considers Sjögren disease. The condition affects the salivary and tear glands most directly, but its reach can extend throughout the body, making the clinical picture harder to read.
Inaba has used her public platform to bring more visibility to the condition. Her decision to speak openly about the diagnosis, the years of uncertainty, and the emotional weight of living with a poorly understood illness reflects a broader effort to reduce the diagnostic delays that many Sjögren patients face. For a condition that an estimated one to four million Americans live with, awareness remains low even among some medical professionals.
