The risk of death from sepsis due to a suppressed immune state was highest at hospitals with the lowest volume of immunosuppressed patients with sepsis, according to a study published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
Researchers examined 350,183 patients with sepsis at 60 hospitals in the Vizient database who were characterized as being immunosuppressed or not immunosuppressed. They divided hospitals into quartiles based on their average volumes of immunosuppressed patients with sepsis per year.
Immunosuppressed patients with sepsis at the 15 hospitals in the first quartile (with 64 to 224 immunosuppressed patients with sepsis per year) faced higher odds of in-hospital death as compared to non-immunosuppressed patients with sepsis at the same hospitals.
Additionally, when the 45 hospitals in the second, third and fourth quartile (with 225 to 1,056 immunosuppressed patients with sepsis per year) were analyzed as a group, the odds of death from sepsis due to immunosuppression was significantly lower than that for patients at the hospitals in the first quartile.