Identifying Possible Sepsis Markers

Sepsis is a syndrome of systemic inflammation in response to infection. It kills about 750,000 people in the United States every year (1), and is also the single most expensive condition treated in the United States, costing the healthcare system more than $20 billion annually. Prompt diagnosis and treatment is essential to save lives, but there is no ‘gold standard’ blood test, and it can be hard to quickly tell sepsis from ‘regular’ inflammation, which isn’t caused by an infection. Some study results hint that sepsis might be identifiable by the expression of certain genes, so researchers wanted to examine existing gene expression data sets to look for such indications.