Sepsis is an often life-threatening response to infection, occurring when host proinflammatory immune responses become abnormally elevated and dysregulated. To diagnose sepsis, the patient must have a confirmed or predicted infection, as well as other symptoms associated with the pathophysiology of sepsis. However, a recent study found that a specific causal organism could not be determined in the majority (70.1%) of sepsis cases, likely due to aggressive antibiotics or localized infections. The timing of a patient’s sepsis diagnosis is often predictive of their clinical outcome, underlining the need for a more definitive molecular diagnostic test.
