A team of U.S. and international pediatric medical experts developed a new definition of sepsis in children at the Society for Critical Care Medicine's 2024 Critical Care Congress being held in Phoenix, Jan. 21-23.
In a study published Jan. 21 in JAMA, researchers set out to understand how data from measures of organ dysfunction can be used to predict sepsis mortality rates in children. After analyzing outcomes from 3.6 million pediatric encounters, they determined that a new scoring mechanism, dubbed the Phoenix Sepsis Score, "performed better than existing organ dysfunction scores and the International Pediatric Sepsis Consensus Conference criteria," the authors wrote.
The new criteria's focus on organ dysfunction rather than systemic inflammation follows a similar shift in how experts detect sepsis in adults. The Phoenix Sepsis Score includes function of cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological and coagulation systems.
The researchers were part of the Society of Critical Care Medicine Pediatric's Sepsis Definition Task Force, which had been tasked with updating the definition in 2019. The group's goal was to create a definition that could be more generally applied to hospitals with different resources in different settings, while also defining the criteria that would be most effective at helping detect true positive sepsis cases and cut down on misdiagnoses.
"The novel Phoenix sepsis criteria, which were derived and validated using a large international database of pediatric hospital encounters in higher- and lower-resource settings, had improved performance for the diagnosis of pediatric sepsis and septic shock compared with the existing … criteria," the authors wrote.