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
Sepsis IS a generalised infection affecting most of all of the body where bacteria or viruses cause an immune reaction.
Such an immune reaction can lead the body to act defensively but dangerously in various ways causing organ failure.
By the time this happens (in about one in seven cases) the infective agents has been reduced below the point of identification.
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