Surgical infections more serious risk in surgeries than other complications

Carol Forsloff - New research from The Methodist Hospital in Houston finds infection is more common and more deadly than any other type of complication from surgery.  It holds higher risk to a patient than heart attack or clots and those with risk factors for infection should be screened.

Medical personnel need to be better attuned to the potential for infection and make better determination of those more likely to have sepsis, experts say.  Sepsis is a condition caused by a severe infection.  The number of people dying from it has almost doubled in the past 20 years, according to researchers.

”This research shows that hospitals need to identify at-risk patients earlier and implement sepsis screening and early evidence based interventions with vigilance,” said Dr. Laura Moore, surgeonat Methodist and principal investigator for the study. “Hospitals must put in place consistent, effective measures that are easy to implement.”

Severe sepsis is the leading cause of organ failure and mortality in general surgery ICUs. 934,000 people annually get infections.  Risk factors for this include age of patient (over 60), the need for emergency surgery and the presence of certain co-morbidities like diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer or obesity.  

“There’s nothing we can do to change the fact that a patient is over 60, needs emergency surgery or has diabetes, for instance,” said Moore. “But if we understand the risk factors, there are a lot of relatively simple steps we can take to recognize sepsis and intervene early. We can save 10 times more lives addressing sepsis than we do with all the controls in place to prevent myocardial infarction or pulmonary embolisms.”

Moore has designed and implemented an effective sepsis screening tool to use in the surgical ICU that can be easily used by health care providers and that can determine early indicators of the onset of sepis.  These early indicators include heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate and white blood cell count.  These are checked to determine the possibility of sepsis and for these issues to be addressed immediately, often with antibiotics to eliminate the infection.