Vital sepsis treatment breakthrough will save hundreds of lives
The battle continues for better understanding of sepsis among medical practitioners and a faster, coordinated response to prevent avoidable deaths.
The Fieldfisher medical negligence team continues to lobby for better practices and helps clients to share their often terrible stories in the hope of generating change.
Last October, a damning report by the NHS ombudsman Rob Behrens said that sepsis was still killing too many patients because of the same hospital failings that occurred a decade ago.
Avoidable, often fatal errors include delays in spotting and treating the condition, poor communication between staff, sub-standard record keeping and missed opportunities for follow-up care. Mr Behrens said at the time that urgent and major improvements were needed to avoid more deaths.
Now at least some positive news from scientists by way of successful trials of a blood test combined with an AI generated personalised risk model that provides more accurate diagnosis of sepsis and highlights who is likely to develop more severe symptoms.
Researchers studied 1,364 plasma samples of adults admitted to the emergency department at Skåne University hospital with suspected sepsis between 2016 and 2023. Of 1,073 patients with an infection, 913 had sepsis.
The team then created molecular signatures to train an AI model to predict who was likely to go into septic shock. Patients were classified as low, medium and high risk of developing septic shock, with the technology able to show how increasing risk was associated with a higher rate of death.
Currently, there are an estimated 11 million sepsis-related deaths worldwide every year. The researchers are hopeful that the dual approach will identify sepsis earlier and thereby save lives.
Separate research from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Oxford has also found that people respond differently to sepsis based on their genetic makeup. This means certain patients will benefit from different treatment to others, with the results hopefully leading to more f targeted therapies.
The study, published in Cell Genomics, looked to understand why sepsis response varies between patients and the different regulators and cell types involved in different immune responses.
A more detailed understanding of sepsis at a molecular level could identify those who would benefit from different therapies, helping to design rapid tests, organise clinical trials, and develop targeted treatments based on the individual immune response.
The aim of course is for patients to receive the most effective treatment for their sepsis more quickly, based on personalised treatment that matches their immune response, rather than their symptoms.
Any tools that enable front-line medical staff to identity and treat sepsis quickly will undoubtedly save lives.