About two years ago I was admitted to the ER, then the ICU, then kept in the hospital for septic shock/sepsis but no infection was found. Prior to this experience my understanding of sepsis/septic shock was that there had to be an infection to be the underlying cause.
How is it possible for a body to go into this infection reaction without one? How do they know it’s sepsis and not something else if there’s no infection? My limited research also shows that in these cases the mortality rate is higher, why is that? Is that just because if they can’t find a cause it’s harder to treat?
Edit: I’ve also tried to do a lot of reading about septic shock/sepsis in general and don’t really understand it so a baseline explanation of what it is might also help.
In: Biology
There are various forms of shock, where your body can’t supply organs with blood.
Septic shock occurs specifically in response to infection. However, that infectious source is not always readily identified. In addition, there are various forms of shock that can *mimic* septic shock. Sometimes we admit patients with what appears to be septic shock and we never find an infectious source or other cause. Sometimes patients get better and we don’t know what caused it. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we start treating them for septic shock (survival depends on starting antibiotics very early) but further testing and evaluation identifies another cause of shock (like heart failure).
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