I don't understand sepsis?

[scilearner]

Hello everyone,

I don't understand sepsis. Ok I know Sepsis is SIRS (Systemic inflammatory response syndrome) to an infection. But I'm confused with these scenarios.

1) Lets say I have a UTI in kidney. The immune system localises the infection to kidney and causes massive inflammation in that area and fights the disease, with out allowing it to spread to otherarea. Now is this Sepsis? If it is not what do you call it? Here also inflammation towards infection occurs so why is it not called sepsis? Does CRP increase in this scenario?

2) Lets say I have a UTI in kidney. It spreads to all areas in body. Massive systemic inflammation occurs towards the infection. I'm assuming this is sepsis?, then what do you call scenario 1 I described. What happens to CRP in this condition.

3) You want inflammation and immune response against infections to fight them. So why is sepsis bad?

Thanks

[Prometheus]

Sepsis is the presence of SIRS plus a likely source of infection. Based on the information given alone we couldn't be sure whether SIRS is present. Even the second case isn't necessarily sepsis if the specified parameters aren't off (though they likely are). Inflammation is a normal response but if it's local to your larynx you're in trouble - it really depends on the situation. Bottom line, sepsis kills. A lot.

 

I think maybe you're getting hung up on what are essentially arbitrary criteria when you seem to actually want to understand the pathophysiology. If the latter is the case, focus on learning immunology perhaps, the definitions of SIRS/sepsis are only really useful if you are a clinician.

[sciencehealth]

Sepsis basically means spread of the infection from the original site via blood to another site in the body.

 

By another definition, the mere presence of bacteria in the blood, when it does not cause symptoms, is called bacteremia, and when it does, it is called sepsis.

[physica]

Prometheus's point still stands. Sepsis is an arbitrary classification. In the department I work we use it to communicate that the patient is clinically unstable and need iv antibiotics quickly. If the infection had spread to another area in the body but they were clinically fine, young and walking around I would get grilled for describing the patient to another specialty as septic as they would stop what they were doing and come down to assess. There is a lot of prioritizing in clinical practice. the term sepsis is simply used to help that.