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Commonly known as ‘blood poisoning,’ sepsis is really a deadly condition caused by the body’s inflammatory response to a infection that usually results in tissue and organ damage.
Now, preliminary studies at King’s College London indicate that the simple genetic test can diagnose the condition in 2 hours rather than the two days necessary for a conventional diagnosis, based on new research in the open access journal PLOS ONE.
“Sepsis is a hidden killer, causing nearly another of all hospital deaths. Rapid antibiotic treatment for the problem is vital C every minute counts,” said study author Graham Lord, a professor of medicine at King’s College London. “Yet current diagnostic methods may take as much as two days, so a precise diagnostic test that can be carried out in the patient’s bedside is urgently needed.”
To find a biomarker for sepsis, the international team of researchers checked out items of genetic material known as microRNAs, which encode and regulate DNA C particularly regarding an immune response. The study scientists took liquid blood samples from three categories of patients at two hospitals in the united kingdom and Sweden: individuals with sepsis, patients having a similar condition called Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS), and healthy patients.
Genetic material in the blood samples was amplified to find out which microRNAs were more prevalent because of sepsis. According to their report, the team was able to find a group of microRNAs which were more active in the sepsis patients, denoting a potential biomarker for the condition.
“We have the very first time identified several biomarkers within the blood that are good indicators of sepsis,” Lord said. “We show that it’s easy to detect these markers by screening a patient’s blood in the ward, a process which can deliver results within 2 hours. It is really an extremely exciting development that has the potential to totally transform the control over this severe disease and save a large number of lives worldwide each year.”
“These are promising early findings, and now we need to test this method inside a large medical trial,” he added.
The researchers noted that sepsis appears much like SIRS, but only sepsis responds to treatment with antibiotics. This distinction causes it to be vital for clinicians to be able to differentiate the 2 conditions as using antibiotics in non-sepsis cases could be both ineffective and potentially increase the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
“Not only would a precise diagnostic test improve outcomes for patients, however it would contribute to tackling the ongoing problem of antibiotic resistance by permitting clinicians to distinguish between SIRS and sepsis and diagnose these severe conditions more accurately,” Lord said.
In an interview with BBC News, the King’s College professor laid out a possible timetable for when the study results could translate into a real diagnostic test.
“If our early phase result stands up in a large trial, it might have significant effects in preserving thousands of lives and reducing the use of unnecessary antibiotics,” he explained. “If we can be its value in prospective trials, we can very rapidly translate it into NHS clinical care.”
