Blood Test May Predict Risk for Septic Death

This group included patients from three tertiary care hospitals: an initial discovery cohort and two validation patient sets.

Biochemicals in plasma with a mass-to-charge (m/z) ratio of 100 to 1,000 daltons were measured using label-free liquid chromatography (LC) and gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS). Clinical assays of serum creatinine, capillary lactate, and serum glucose correlated well with log-transformed normalized plasma MS values indicating that the MS assays of metabolite concentrations were semi-quantitative. Nontargeted ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC)–MS/MS and GC-MS analyses were performed at Metabolon (Durham, NC, USA). The GC-MS was performed on a Thermo-Finnigan Trace DSQ fast-scanning single-quadrupole MS (Thermo Scientific; Waltham, MA, USA)

The biomarker panel consisted primarily of carnitine esters with medium- or short-chain fatty acids and branched-chain amino acids. The plasma concentrations of the carnitine esters were decreased in sepsis survivors and elevated in sepsis nonsurvivors relative to controls. Fatty acid levels were also elevated among the sepsis nonsurvivors. There were no major differences between patients with infections with Streptococcus pneumonia, Escherichia coli, or Staphylococcus aureus. The differences between survivors and nonsurvivors increased over time, so that serial testing in individual patients may be more beneficial in differentiating those patients with poor outcomes. The study was published on July 24, 2013, in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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US National Center for Genome Resources

Metabolon

Thermo Scientific