Gram-negative sepsis: what dilemma?

Gram-negative sepsis: what dilemma?

Gram-negative sepsis: a dilemma of modern medicine.

Gram-negative sepsis is an increasingly common problem, with up to 300,000 cases occurring each year in the United States alone. Despite the ongoing development of new antibiotics, mortality from gram-negative sepsis remains unacceptably high. To stimulate earlier therapeutic intervention by physicians, a new set of broad definitions has been proposed to define the systemic inflammatory respons...

serum procalcitonin levels distinguish gram-negative bacterial sepsis from gram-positive bacterial and fungal sepsis

background: serum procalcitonin (pct) levels differ in patients with bacterial or fungal infections and are significantly elevated in patients with gram-negative bacteremia. we evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of different inflammatory markers to discriminate sepsis caused by different pathogens. materials and methods: we included 328 episodes of bacteremia from 292 patients with sepsis and 31...

Gram-positive and gram-negative bacterial toxins in sepsis

Bacterial sepsis is a major cause of fatality worldwide. Sepsis is a multi-step process that involves an uncontrolled inflammatory response by the host cells that may result in multi organ failure and death. Both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria play a major role in causing sepsis. These bacteria produce a range of virulence factors that enable them to escape the immune defenses and dis...

Concordance of endotoxemia with gram-negative bacteremia in patients with gram-negative sepsis: a meta-analysis.

The Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) assay is a sensitive method for detecting endotoxin. Using gram-negative (GN) bacteremia as the basis for comparison, concordance with endotoxemia in 45 studies could be expressed as an odds ratio. Calculation of summary odds ratios by the Mantel-Haenszel-Peto method indicated that the concordance of the results was no higher by the chromogenic LAL assay than ...