What Sepsis Researchers Can Learn from COVID-19

Upcoming and urgent challenges in critical care research based on COVID-19 pandemic experience

“…Highlighted by mRNA vaccine development, which was a breakthrough based on decades of research, research teams and organisations have been challenged during the pandemic and have shown remarkable abilities to adapt. Compared to research previously done in other fields of sepsis, especially bacterial sepsis which has been the most studied [1], homogeneous groups of patients and site-specific alterations in COVID-19 critical patients were all favourable to achieving effective results faster than expected [2]. However, researchers also faced many obstacles.…”

Sepsis Performance Improvement Programs: From Evidence Toward Clinical Implementation

“…During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the ISF proposed an adjusted version of the original outcome set, which was adopted globally [ 40 , 41 ]. Improving outcome parameters such as resource use, duration of invasive treatments, and the development of organ dysfunction that requires higher levels of care, suddenly became extremely valuable in a resource-scarce setting [ 42 ]. Future studies on sepsis performance improvement programs and sepsis care bundles should similarly expand the core set of outcome measures to capture these additional benefits.…”

Association of clinical sub-phenotypes and clinical deterioration in COVID-19: further cluster analyses

“…Recently in the journal, Legrand and colleagues identified three distinct clinical sub-phenotypes of COVID-19, which may help recognize patients at high risk of deterioration [2]. Earlier work in sepsis has shown that clinical phenotypes may help understand the heterogeneity in disease presentation and inform trial design [3,4]. The retrospective cohort study of Legrand et al consisted of 893 patients of which 608 were used for cluster analysis, after excluding patients with missing data.…”