How is sepsis diagnosed?
Sepsis is a serious condition. Treatments are often done in an intensive care or critical care unit of a hospital. You may need one or more of the following: • Medicines: • Antibiotics: Antibiotics may be given to help treat or prevent an infection caused by germs called bacteria. • Heart medicine: This medicine may be given to make your heart beat stronger or more regularly. There are many different kinds of heart medicines. Talk with your caregiver to find out what your medicine is and why you are taking it. • Recombinant human activated protein C: This is also called “rhAPC”. This medicine breaks apart blood clots and prevents swelling. • Steroids: Steroid medicine may be given to decrease inflammation, which is redness, pain, and swelling. • Surgery: You may also need surgery to treat problems causing sepsis.
Clinically, the patient needs to fit at least two of the SIRS criteria listed above and have a suspected or proven infection. Definitive diagnosis depends on a positive blood culture for an infectious agent and at least two of the SIRS criteria. However, two subsets of the four criteria depend on lab analysis; white blood cell examinations and PaCO2. These subset criteria, like blood cultures, are done in clinical laboratories. There are other diagnoses that indicate the severity of the patient’s sepsis. Severe sepsis is diagnosed when the septic patient has organ dysfunction (for example, low or no urine flow, altered mental status). Severe sepsis can also include sepsis-induced hypotension (also termed septic shock) when the patient’s blood pressure falls (usually How is sepsis (blood poisoning) treated? In almost every case of sepsis, patients need to be hospitalized, treated with appropriate intravenous antibiotics, and given therapy to support any organ dysfunction. Sepsis can qui
