Surgical procedures to an experimental polymicrobial sepsis: cecal ligation and puncture

ABSTRACT

Sepsis is still a leading cause of death worldwide and the mechanism of shock remains to be completely understood. Several studies have aimed to evaluate the effects of several drugs and procedures in sepsis, and the most common models of this study are to challenge mice with LPS or to simulate a polymicrobial infection using a surgical procedure. Such procedure consists in exposure of the cecum by a midline laparotomy, ligature of ileocecal junction and perforation with a needle, squeezing cecum contents to the peritoneum cavity. Beyond the variations allowed by this model, the thickness of the needle used and the number of perforations seem to be an important factor, displaying different levels of sepsis severity. In this study, we used two mice strains (C57BL/6 and BALB/c) to describe the procedures of cecal ligation and puncture (CLP), comparing the survival rates of mice subjected to three different thicknesses of perforation.