Half of all patients with sepsis admitted to an emergency medical department died within two years, according to Danish researchers investigating factors that could predict outcomes for these patients.

Dr. Finn E. Nielsen, a senior scientist in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark, told the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Tuesday) that he and his colleagues examined deaths over a long follow-up period in a prospective study of 714 adult patients admitted to the emergency department with sepsis.

Their findings revealed several risk factors associated with sepsis-related deaths.

In a report in 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted limitations and gaps in knowledge about sepsis outcomes, with existing studies having a mixture of designs, differences in data sources, and different definitions of sepsis, all of which produced considerable variations in estimates of incidence and deaths from the condition. The WHO called for prospective studies to investigate long-term outcomes for sepsis patients.

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