Recent advances in understanding and managing sepsis

Abstract

The last two to three years provided several “big steps” regarding our understanding and management of sepsis. The increasing insight into pathomechanisms of post-infectious defense led to some new models of host response. Besides hyper-, hypo-, and anti-inflammation as the traditional approaches to sepsis pathophysiology, tolerance and resilience were described as natural ways that organisms react to microbes. In parallel, huge data analyses confirmed these research insights with a new way to define sepsis and septic shock (called “Sepsis-3”), which led to discussions within the scientific community. In addition to these advances in understanding and defining the disease, follow-up protocols of the initial “sepsis bundles” from the Surviving Sepsis Campaign were created; some of them were part of quality management studies by clinicians, and some were in the form of mandatory procedures. As a result, new “bundles” were initiated with the goal of enabling standardized management of sepsis and septic shock, especially in the very early phase. This short commentary provides a brief overview of these two major fields as recent hallmarks of sepsis research.