Canadian-made test could help diagnose sepsis, researchers say

Sepsis kills thousands of people in Canada and close to 50 million people worldwide every year, said Dr. Claudia dos Santos, and treating it quickly is crucial to survival.

A team of Canadian researchers has created a test they say could quickly predict if a patient is going to develop sepsis, a life-threatening condition that happens when the immune system has a dysfunctional reaction to an infection and starts attacking the body’s own organs and tissues.

Sepsis kills thousands of people in Canada and close to 50 million people worldwide every year, said Dr. Claudia dos Santos, senior author of a research paper about the test published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Treating sepsis quickly is crucial to survival, said dos Santos, who is a clinician-scientist and critical care physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“A one-hour delay in the treatment of sepsis can increase mortality by close to eight per cent,” she said, noting that acting within the first six hours is very important.

The problem is that there is currently no single test that can tell doctors which patients with infections — which can be anything from COVID-19 to a bacterial infection from a cut — will go on to develop sepsis, she said.

That’s because symptoms of sepsis are “non-specific” and could also be symptoms of illness from the infection itself, including a fever, a high respiratory or heart rate, low blood pressure, low urine output, an abnormal white blood cell count and confusion.

So physicians use their best clinical judgment, but it’s based on a “suspicion” of sepsis rather than a clear biological marker, dos Santos said.

“We do everything that we possibly can in the first six golden hours of sepsis and we cross our fingers and watch and see what happens. And the motivation behind this paper is there has to be a better way.”