Scientists Probe Sepsis' Deadly Secrets( Inflammatory condition is 10th leadin...),Health

Inflammatory condition is 10th leading killer in United States, experts say

FRIDAY, Aug. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Even when they appear clinically similar, patients with potentially deadly sepsis may be having different kinds of immune responses, say U.S. researchers who conducted the first large-scale natural history study of the common condition.

Sepsis -- a result of the body's inflammatory response to infection -- can lead to organ failure and death. Almost one million people in the United States will develop sepsis this year, and about 30 percent will die, making it the 10th leading cause of death in the country.

The University of Pittsburgh team said its findings suggest that past interpretations of how the immune system responds to infection were incorrect, because they were based on data from small studies. As a result, most of the treatments based on those studies have proven ineffective.

For this study, the University of Pittsburgh team evaluated data from almost 1,900 patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), the leading cause of severe sepsis. More than 30 percent of the patients developed severe sepsis, and 26 percent of those patients died.

The researchers found that 82 percent of the CAP patients had elevated cytokine levels, which were highest among those with fatal severe sepsis and lowest among those with no sepsis. Cytokines are signaling proteins especially involved in immune and inflammatory processes.

The study was published this week in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

"Our data show that much of what we previously thought about the role of the inflammatory response plays in sepsis was wrong or incomplete," Dr. John A. Kellum, professor in the department of critical care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

"We had thought the inflammatory response to infection was relatively short-li
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