Learning About Sepsis - Health Channel

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Learning About Sepsis |

Learning About Sepsis, Health Channel

Sepsis is an infection that can damage organs causing them to fail and it has been the leading cause of death in hospitals.

Carlos Torres-Viera, Infectious Disease Physician with West Kendall Baptist Hospital, explains any infectious diseases can lead to sepsis. It means the infection is so severe that the blood pressure drops and the heart and breathing go fast.

He also says sepsis is a term to describe a very serious infection, so a person can have tuberculosis and sepsis, for example.

Transcript

Learning About Sepsis, Health Channel

I want to now switch gears to something that when people hear they kind of say oh my goodness you know sepsis and if you don’t know what sepsis it’s very serious it’s an infection that can damage organs causing them to fail and for decades it’s been the leading cause of death in hospitals so break it down for me doctor in terms of what it is and and why it’s just so dangerous. Sepsis is a general terminology basically it doesn’t describe specific infectious diseases but any infectious diseases can lead to sepsis sepsis is a terminology that we use in medicine to basically describe very severe infections and there are some parameters that are used by a physician to determine that a patient is septic or not but for general public it basically means when we use the patient’s septic or you have sepsis is that the infection is very severe and so severe sometimes that you blood pressure drops that you are tachycardic meaning your heart goes fast that you are breathing very fast because you have shortness of breath and that you have fever and that your immune system has kicked up because there is an infectious process one thing that happens when you get an infection is that the result of the outcome from the infection comes from how aggressive the bacteria can be and how likely are you to response to the infection I mean if you are immunosuppressed you are less likely to respond and also have to do with how exuberantly your immune system responds to the infection and what you want is a balance there so you don’t want the immune system to go crazy because that can destroy your organs as well and then when we mean sepsis also then the patient the organs start to fail because of the severity of the infection so that’s the general terminology and as I said you can have tuberculosis and have sepsis you can have influenza and have sepsis that you can have pneumonia and sepsis you can have urinary tract infectionn and sepsis or you can have them without sepsis when you don’t have a severe infection.

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