Quicker Sepsis Treatment Saves Lives: Q & A With Sepsis Researcher Christopher Seymour

Sepsis is a serious medical condition caused by an overwhelming immune response to infection. The body’s infection-fighting chemicals trigger widespread inflammation, which can lead to blood clots and leaky blood vessels. As a result, blood flow is impaired, depriving organs of nutrients and oxygen. In severe cases, one or more organs fail. In the worst cases, blood pressure drops, the heart weakens, and the patient spirals toward septic shock. Once this happens, multiple organs—lungs, kidneys, liver—may quickly fail, and the patient can die. Because sepsis is traditionally hard to diagnose, doctors do not always recognize the condition in its early stages. In the past, it has been unclear how quickly sepsis needs to be diagnosed and treated to provide patients with the best chance of surviving. Credit: University of Pittsburgh. Now we may have an answer: A large-scale clinical study, published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine , found that for every hour treatment is delayed, the odds of a patient’s survival are reduced by 4 percent. Christopher Seymour , assistant professor of critical care and emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, and his team analyzed the medical records of nearly 50,000 sepsis patients at 149 clinical centers to determine whether administering the standard sepsis treatment—antibiotics and intravenously administered fluids—sooner would save more lives. I spoke with Seymour about his experience treating sepsis pat...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Physical Trauma and Sepsis Source Type: blogs