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Determining whether systemic inflammation stems from infection or a noninfectious cause is challenging. Recent work has shown that several families of pattern-recognition receptors are key to the initial host response to infection. Now, using publicly available data from several microarray-based genome-wide expression studies of patients with sepsis or systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), investigators have defined a set of genes that appear to be differentially expressed early in the course of sepsis.
Studying 2903 microarrays from 27 independent gene-expression data sets, the researchers found that analysis of 168 genes could relatively cleanly distinguish SIRS/trauma from sepsis/infection. Distinction was best with use of sampl…