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Modernising Medical Microbiology and Big Infection Diagnostics

Infections in Oxfordshire Database (IORD)
Home > Research Themes Overview > Modernising Medical Microbiology and Big Infection Diagnostics > Infections in Oxfordshire Research Database > IORD Projects > Defining normal response to culture-positive and culture-negative sepsis

IORD Project

Defining normal response to culture-positive and culture-negative sepsis

ONGOING
IORD category: Specific Infections
Chief Investigator: Prof Sarah Walker, Prof David Eyre
Sponsor: OUH
Research location: Oxford University
Approval date: 17 Dec 2021

Longer than necessary antibiotic courses in patients with sepsis (an infection of the blood) may lead to side-effects like C diff diarrhoea, and increase antibiotic resistance. But not switching antibiotics promptly when patients don’t respond or get worse is harmful. In hospital, lots of blood tests are done routinely and patient status is regularly monitored, e.g. through oxygen saturation. We want to see whether we can use these routine measurements to work out what “getting better normally” looks like for patients with sepsis (whether or not a microbe causing the illness is found). We want to bring information together from lots of different measurements into a single score which could say how an individual patient was responding compared with “typical” patients doing well. This would be like the growth charts used in children to work out whether they are growing normally. We will then test using statistical methods whether this could be used to help doctors stop antibiotics faster when they are no longer needed, or switch them more quickly when this might help patients.

See publication: Distinct patterns of vital sign and inflammatory marker responses in adults with suspected bloodstream infection

MODERNISING MEDICAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIG INFECTION DIAGNOSTICS →

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