Sepsis, the body’s reaction to infection in what is normally a sterile bloodstream, is a major cause of mortality in the United States (1). I used a microarray data set from a cohort of thirty-one patients with septic shock or systemic inflammatory response syndrome (2) to determine the major transcriptional changes associated with each disease state. I found that globally, the granulocytes of patients with SIRS resembled that of patients with septic shock at the level of transcription. For many genes expressed in the granulocyte, SIRS represented an “intermediate” gene expression state between that of control patients and those of patients with septic shock. The identification of the most differentially expressed genes in the granulocytic immune cells of patients with septic shock can facilitate the development of novel therapeutics or diagnostics for a condition that, despite decades of research, possesses a 14.7% to 29.9% in-hospital mortality rate (1).
Global transcriptional profiling of CD15+ granulocytes from patients with septic shock and systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS).