Slightly more than 50% of people who are admitted to an emergency room with sepsis die within two years, new data shows.
The data was presented at the European Society for Emergency Medicine conference on Monday.
Scientists analyzed data from 714 people who were admitted to Denmark’s Aarhus University Hospital with sepsis between October 2017 and March 2018. After a median follow-up period of two years, 361 of the people had died from any cause.
Old age raised a person’s risk of death by 4% for every additional year of age, researchers found.
People who had a history of cancer had more than double the risk of death, while clogged arteries increased the mortality risk by 39% and dementia increased risk by 90%, the data showed. People who had had sepsis within the previous six months were 48% more likely to die.
“We believe this knowledge is useful for both clinicians and researchers in the field of acute medicine,” Finn Nielsen, one of the study authors and a senior scientist of clinical epidemiology at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, said in a news release. “Recognizing that sepsis is a serious illness with high mortality is crucial.”
Larger studies are needed to replicate the findings, “to obtain a comprehensive epidemiological picture of sepsis, including the long-term prognostic aspects of physical, mental and cognitive disorders, and the potential impact of these factors on the risk of death,” Nielsen noted.
“Sepsis is a serious and potentially fatal medical condition. The incidence of sepsis is increasing in several countries, yet so far, there has been limited, reliable information about long-term outcomes for patients who develop sepsis,” Barbra Backus, MD, chair of the EUSEM’s abstract selection committee, said in the statement.
