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Critical Care Medicine

Sepsis survivors faced high mortality after hospital discharge

In a Catalan cohort of 237,075 adult and pediatric sepsis survivors, 42% died within two years of leaving the hospital.

Paper by Carol Lorencio, Emili Vela, Elisabeth Esteban-Torné, +10 more authorsJuan Carlos Yébenes · Universitat de Girona · Hospital de Mataró
Upright faceless people cluster densely on one side and sparsely beside a scarred liver and a brain with widely separated folds.

Our read

Populations
Studied:
Cohort study of 237,075 adult and pediatric sepsis survivors, 2 years
What changed:
Among sepsis survivors, 42% died within 2 years after hospital discharge
The catch:
No nonsepsis comparison group allowed separation of sepsis-related deaths from background mortality
In the record:
The 312th paper on Charlson Comorbidity Index with results in people; 1,161 on record in all. Its result on mortality agrees with 153 of 165 other findings on record; 2 point the other way and 10 found no change.

Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News

Paper
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Adult and pediatric patients hospitalized with sepsis in Catalonia, Spain, between 2005 and 2019 were followed through health records in a retrospective population-based cohort study. Sepsis is a life-threatening response to infection. Among 237,075 patients who survived to hospital discharge, 99,571, or 42%, died within two years.

Mortality rose with age, from 5.8% among patients younger than 15 to 62% among those older than 84. Patients with more coexisting illnesses also had higher mortality. Longer hospital stays were associated with higher mortality. The researchers also observed a decline in long-term mortality during 2017–2019.

Why it matters

Care after sepsis is particularly relevant to older people with multiple illnesses. The authors called for structured care focused on high-risk survivors, better continuity of care and prevention of long-term complications.

Caveats

The analysis followed sepsis survivors without a comparison group without sepsis, so it could not determine how much later mortality was attributable to sepsis itself. It excluded patients transferred to another facility.

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