News: New technology may detect sepsis more quickly, study shows

Clinicians may be able to detect and treat sepsis more quickly in the future, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says at least 1.7 million people in this country develop sepsis annually, and about 350,000 die during hospitalization or are discharged to hospice. Considering mortality can rise 8% for each hour that treatment is delayed, finding a quicker method to confirm the diagnosis is vital, Medscape Medical News reported.

One of the most common methods of determining if a patient has a bloodstream infection is through traditional blood cultures, but the process takes about 24 hours to detect the bacteria category and another day to determine the bacteria’s location. In this new research, however, researchers were able to detect four causes of bloodstream infections in just 2.5 hours with about 1 mL of blood.

The technique they used involves breaking down whole blood and drying it by heating, which results in a solid porous structure trapping the bacterial DNA inside. Primers and enzymes were then used to reach inside the structure and amplify the target DNA.

"This technique can have broad applications in detection of bacterial infection and presence of bacteria in large values of blood," said Rashid Bashir, PhD, dean of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Grainger College of Engineering, and a co-author of the study, in an interview with Medscape Medical News.

The ability to identify the type of blood infection in just 2.5 hours is an amazing feat, according to Hou, who said, “With sepsis, ​it is helpful to have rapid diagnostics where results come back quickly. Rapid is never rapid enough. These researchers are pushing the bar for what rapid means.”

Editor’s note: To read Medscape Medical News’ coverage of this story, click here. To read the study, click here.