New Delhi, Oct 15 || Cancer and dementia are the major risk factors that increase the risk of mortality among patients with sepsis admitted to the emergency medical department, according to a study on Tuesday.
Sepsis is a life-threatening emergency caused by a dysregulated host immune response to an infection that claims millions of lives globally each year.
The study led by a team of Danish researchers found that age and heart disease were the other reasons that can raise the risk of death in sepsis patients within two years.
“We found that certain factors increased the risk of death after sepsis, including, not surprisingly, advanced age,” said Dr. Finn E. Nielsen, a senior scientist in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark.
“Additionally, conditions such as dementia, heart disease, cancer, and previous hospitalisation with sepsis within the last six months before admission also elevated the risk of dying during a median follow-up period of two years,” Nielsen said.
In the paper, presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Copenhagen, the team examined deaths over a long follow-up period in a prospective study of 714 adult patients admitted to the emergency department with sepsis between October 2017 and the end of March 2018.
The team found that after a median of two years, 361 (50.6 per cent) of the patients with sepsis had died from any cause, including sepsis.
Older age increases the risk of death by 4 per cent for every additional year of age.