Results from a large U.S. study including data on almost four million children, led by Harvard Medical School, show around 18% of pediatric hospital deaths are linked to sepsis.
As reported in JAMA, the team also found that the overall incidence of sepsis was 1.3%, impacting 51,542 children out of the 3,925,809 total hospitalizations included in the study.
Sepsis is life threatening in both children and adults and occurs when the body’s reaction to an infection causes organ damage. Although it is known to be a leading cause of health problems and death in children, the true burden of sepsis in this group has been hard to measure.
In this study, lead author Chanu Rhee, MD, Harvard Medical School associate professor at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and colleagues measured something they called a Pediatric Sepsis Event (PSE) in 3.9 million hospitalizations of children aged 30 days to 17 years from electronic health record data.
In this study, a child was counted as having a PSE if they were having strong, ongoing treatment for a suspected serious infection and there were clear signs that their organs were not working properly.
Overall, the researchers found that the children admitted to hospital were aged six years on average and 44% were girls. The incidence of sepsis was 1.3%–73% with community onset and 62% with septic shock.
Around 10% of the children admitted to hospital died and in this group 18% had sepsis. This rate is higher than might have been expected, as only around 6–10% of deaths in adults linked to sepsis despite rates of sepsis being higher in adults than in children.
Notably, he researchers found no difference in the number of sepsis cases or deaths between 2016 and 2022.
“This study provides the first national estimates of non-neonatal pediatric sepsis in U.S. hospitals using validated electronic clinical criteria aligned with Phoenix criteria. The PSE criteria extend the Phoenix criteria by translating their organ dysfunction constructs into a standardized definition optimized for scalable electronic health record-based surveillance,” explain the authors.
“These findings underscore the burden of pediatric sepsis and establish a standardized surveillance framework to advance prevention, quality improvement, and policy initiatives.”
