Viewpoint on the current status of researches on sepsis / 解放军医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Sepsis is a common complication after severe trauma and burn, and also one of the main causes of death. Recently, although some new progresses were seen in antibiotic therapy, the mortality of sepsis is still on the rise, and the death rate as a result of sepsis is higher than a total of that of prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDS. Therefore, sepsis has obviously become one of the serious ailments threatening human health. The present paper introduced the international definition of sepsis, severe sepsis and septic shock, the current researches on diagnosis and therapy, and proposed that we should not only pay attention to pathogenesis and treatment, but also to sepsis prevention in sepsis researches, and we should try to find out the breakthrough in the interaction and dynamic balance between human being and pathogenic factors. Researches on the strategies to revert strong toxicity of infectious agents to non-toxic or weak pathogenic factors, and to conduct further research concerning biological characteristics of microorganisms and mechanism of drug resistance in order to render them to lose the drug resistance ability, or to increase its sensitivity to the drugs. The above suggested approaches might form the future strategies for preventing and controlling sepsis.