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Recent studies suggest that mortality from severe sepsis is decreasing. But is this trend seen with all causative pathogens, and how large is the mortality reduction? Using data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample — an administrative dataset approximating a 20% sample of all nonfederal, short-term, general, and specialty hospitals serving adults in the U.S. — researchers in California explored organism-specific severe sepsis mortality trends in the country from 1999 through 2008.
The data for 5,033,257 severe sepsis hospitalizations revealed that such hospitalizations had increased but that in-hospital mortality had decreased significantly — from 40.0% to 27.8% — over the study period. Among the 38.5% of cases for which the causative pathog…