Early Diagnosis of Sepsis: Current Status and Challenges
A special issue of Diagnostics (ISSN 2075-4418). This special issue belongs to the section "Clinical Laboratory Medicine".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2026 | Viewed by 1219
Special Issue Editors
Interests: sepsis; biomarker discovery and validation; signaling pathways
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: emergency medicine
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Sepsis is a widespread systemic disease and is a common reason for people to be admitted to the Emergency Department (ED). It is also one of the main causes of death among patients who access the ED.
According to the 2016 third international consensus on sepsis, sepsis is defined as a syndrome characterized by an uncontrolled response of the organism to an infectious stimulus, and it is considered a life-threatening condition. The incidence of sepsis has been steadily increasing since the first consensus definition (Sepsis-1) in 1991, with approximately 49 million cases of sepsis and 11 million sepsis-related deaths all over the world in 2017.
Based on existing literature, it is hypothesized that measuring presepsin levels in the ED could enhance the speed and specificity of diagnosis, compared to the current diagnostic approach, potentially improving outcomes for patients presenting with sepsis-like symptoms. The objective of our study is to evaluate the role of serum presepsin levels in the early diagnosis of sepsis in patients with suggestive clinical signs, comparing its performance with traditional biomarkers such as CRP, PCT, and blood cultures.
Septic shock is the most severe manifestation and should be defined as a subset of sepsis that presents particularly significant cellular, metabolic, and circulatory abnormalities. It is characterized by a drop in blood pressure, leading to reduced tissue perfusion pressure and causing characteristic shock-induced hypoxia. This condition results in an increase in mortality compared to sepsis alone.
Moreover, sepsis often presents a wide variety of symptoms that can resemble different medical conditions, highlighting the urgent need for more effective early diagnosis methods.
Over the years, scores (such as SOFA, qSOFA, SIRS, NEWS and MEWS), have been developed combining clinical and laboratory factors: for instance,sepsis is clinically identified as a response to infection that causes organ damage such as to increase the patient’s SOFA score by at least 2 points, compared to his baseline condition.
New tools need to improve early diagnosis of sepsis for example biomarkers can offer a rapid and straightforward approach to aid in the early detection of sepsis in emergency departments.
Dr. Andrea Piccioni
Guest Editor
Dr. Gloria Rozzi
Guest Editor Assistant
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Keywords
- sepsis
- early diagnosis of sepsis
- biomarkers
- sepsis mortality
- serum presepsin
- SOFA score
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