IMMUNOSUPPRESSION IN SEPSIS DETECTED BY REACTIVATION OF LATENT VIRUSES

描述（由申请人提供）：医生日益面临脓毒症患者的管理难题。目前在该领域的一个争论是，脓毒症在多大程度上主要是一种由不受控制的炎症引起的组织损伤引起的疾病，还是一种由免疫抑制和未能控制入侵病原体引起的疾病。最近的证据表明，一些脓毒症患者进入延长的抗炎免疫抑制期。这个免疫抑制期的特点是患者无法清除他们的初始感染和继发性医院获得性感染的发展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Physicians are increasingly confronting the difficult problem of management of patients with sepsis. A current debate in the field is the degree to which sepsis is primarily a disorder due to tissue injury from uncontrolled inflammation versus a disorder due to immunosuppression and failure to control invading pathogens. Recent evidence indicates that some patients with sepsis enter a prolonged anti-inflammatory immunosuppressive phase. This immunosuppressive phase is characterized by inability of the patient to clear their initial infection and development of secondary hospital-acquired infections. Another feature of sepsis consistent with impaired immunity is reactivation of latent viruses. The working hypothesis of the present proposal is that sepsis results in loss of immunity manifested by a variety of measures including decreased absolute lymphocyte counts, decreased CD4, CD8, and NK cell counts resulting in viral reactivation. At the conclusion of the project, a method to identify when patients enter the immunosuppressive phase of sepsis will have been identified and key factors that might contribute to sepsis pathogenesis will have been discovered.