Scientists uncover stark realities concerning sepsis patients
With winter just around the corner, diseases have inevitably begun to spread and Danish researchers have recently turned their attention to helping people facing a life-threatening disease.
Today, researchers in Denmark told the European Emergency Medicine Congress about their findings from a study focusing on sepsis patients. Explaining the research, Dr Finn E. Nielsen, a senior scientist in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University Hospital, said he and his team looked into adults who had the disease and the likelihood of dying from it.
Sepsis is a life-threating condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection or injury.
‘We found that certain factors increased the risk of death after sepsis, including, not surprisingly, advanced age. Additionally, conditions such as dementia, heart disease, cancer and previous hospitalisation with sepsis within the last six months before admission also elevated the risk of dying during a median follow-up period of two years,’ said Dr Nielsen.
Dr Nielsen, who is also a specialist in emergency medicine, cardiology and internal medicine, established the sepsis research group in 2017 and the current study examined outcomes among patients admitted with sepsis between October 2017 and the end of March 2018.
He continued: ‘Our study relied on a sepsis database, which provided valuable information based on prospectively collected patient data. Unlike frequently used routine registry data, this approach minimised errors and allowed for more accurate and detailed insights into sepsis effects.’
Overall, 2,110 patients took part in the research, of whom 714 developed sepsis. After two years, 361 patients with sepsis died from any cause, including the illness. Experts also found older age increased the risk of death by 4% for every additional year.
What’s more, a history of cancer more than doubled the risk (121%), heart problems increased the risk of dying by 39% and dementia rose the risk by a whopping 90%. Likewise, patients who were previously admitted to hospital with sepsis within the last six months increased the probability of passing away by 48%.
‘Although we identified several risk factors that clearly increased the risk of death and should provide a focus for clinicians and researchers during the discharge planning process, as well as for developing future prediction studies, we were unable to construct an overall model suitable for predicting mortality in clinical practice. There is a need for prospective studies of the effect of other factors that are not examined in our study, including various complications that may arise following hospitalisation and after discharge,’ Dr Nielsen said.
‘We will be presenting supplementary data to the conference. Including a score for organ failure in a more complex model has improved the ability to predict the risk of long-term death after hospitalisation. This has potential applications in clinical practice and future research.’
Dr Barbra Backus, an emergency physician in Rotterdam, who was not involved in the research, said: ‘Sepsis is a serious and potentially fatal medical condition. The incidence of sepsis is increasing in several countries, yet so far, there has been limited, reliable information about long-term outcomes for patients who develop sepsis. This study has shown certain risk factors that should alert clinicians to the risk of patients with sepsis at an increased risk of dying, so that they can monitor them and follow them up more closely. More research is needed to help us better understand the risk factors for an increased risk of dying from sepsis, which can help to improve treatment.’
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