With close to 25,000 worldwide losing their lives DAILY to Sepsis, please educate yourself on the signs and symptoms. Albany Medical Center has provided us with this informational sheet, The Who, What and How of Sepsis.
We've joined efforts with Albany Medical Center and created the Johnathan R. Vasiliou Sepsis Research and Awareness Fund. Your donations help fund research conducted by Michelle Lennartz, PhD, a professor and biomedical researcher at Albany Medical College. Dr. Lennartz is studying how the immune system helps us stay healthy, and why it doesn’t always protect us from conditions like sepsis, as well as atherosclerosis and lung cancer.
“Every two minutes, someone in the United States dies from sepsis”
“Every 3 1/2 seconds, someone somewhere in the world dies from sepsis”
“About 250,000 Americans die each year from sepsis, a severe illness caused by the body’s overwhelming immune response to infection. That’s more than the number of U.S. deaths annually from prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDS combined.”
What is Sepsis?
Sepsis begins innocuously enough when the immune system performs its usual task of recognizing invading bacteria, viruses or fungi. Immune cells release signaling proteins called cytokines to stimulate one another and overcome the invaders—but for poorly understood reasons, the immune cells release far more cytokines and other inflammatory molecules than is typical. All the extra immune molecules surging through the bloodstream have the inadvertent effect of making blood vessels slack and permeable, reducing blood pressure and allowing the fluid component of the blood to seep into surrounding tissues. The blood components left behind clot in the smallest vessels, preventing oxygen from reaching major organs. At this point, someone with sepsis has transitioned from the earliest stage of the disease, known as systemic inflammatory response syndrome, to the later stages of severe sepsis and septic shock. Confusion sets in, the heart's electrical activity becomes erratic, the kidneys and other organs fail, and blood pressure cannot be raised even with large amounts of intravenous fluids and drugs.
Read the full article in Scientific American, "Researchers Struggle to Develop New Treatments for Sepsis"
Symptoms
- Fever
- Hypothermia
- Heart rate >90 beats per minute (bpm)
- Fast respiratory rate
- Altered mental status (confusion/coma)
- Edema (swelling)
- High blood glucose without diabetes
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