Sepsis is the combination of a known or suspected infection and an accompanying systemic inflammatory response.
Severe sepsis is sepsis with acute dysfunction of one or more organ systems; septic shock is a subset of severe sepsis.
Severe sepsis is common, frequently fatal, and expensive.
Mechanisms of Organ Dysfunction in Sepsis
Development of organ dysfunction is the most important clinical event during sepsis, as it directly relates to mortality and morbidity. Although the new definition of sepsis captures this concept, centering the clinical essence of sepsis on the development of a ‘life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection,’1
Three of these disruptive ideas are of particular relevance here. The first is that organs can develop dysfunction during sepsis in theased oxygen delivery,4,5 suggesting that tissue hypoxia may not be an isolated mechanism. This explains why perfusion-targeted therapeutic efforts may surmount only to partial or to no benefit.6 The second is that o absence of decrergan dysfunction can occur in the absence of significant cell death,7–9 suggesting the lack of function is not due to structural damage but, rather, to a shut-down of usual cellular activities. This has fueled speculation that early on, organ dysfunction may be an adaptive strategy to overwhelming inflammatory injury.10 Of course, should this process become sustained it will become maladaptive and carry the known association with poor prognosis. The third concept is the recognition that the action of the immune system against invading pathogens (also known as resistance capacity) is only part of the body’s defense mechanisms against infection. Only recently was the mechanism known as Tolerance in the fields of plant ecology and biology, and defined as the capacity of the host to limit cellular and tissue injury derived from immune or pathogen action, described in mammals.1
Retrieve from (2023 ) : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6922007/#:~:text=Importantly%2C%20organ%20dysfunction%20in%20sepsis,dysregulation%2C%20and%20cellular%20metabolic%20reprogramming.
