How are sepsis and septic shock related?

Question

Accepted Answer

Hi, everybody. Welcome back. The next question says, which of the following conditions is characterized by a systemic inflammatory response to infection with symptoms such as fever, rapid heart rate, rapid breathing and altered mental status. A sepsis. B, septic shock, C syphilis or D mucormycosis. Well, we can probably rule out to syphilis right away. Um Presumably that is fairly familiar as a sexually transmitted infection. It has a range of symptoms and it can cause altered mental status in its most advanced form if it's gotten to the point where it's causing neurological symptoms, but it's not this systemic response to infection. It's a specific bacterial illness caused by treponema pallium. Whereas our question is asking about a systemic inflammatory responses to infection, not a specific infection. And syphilis also wouldn't cause, you know, rapid heart rate, rapid breathing. Although again, in its advanced stage, it can affect mental status, but we can probably eliminate that right away. If we're just glancing over our options. D two would be sort of an obvious choice to cross out. Um, whenever you see that mycosis, it means a fungal infection. So again, we're talking about a specific infection specifically, it's caused by a fungus of the murali order. It's a serious infection that can destroy tissue, but it usually occurs as a localized infection like a sinusitis. And it occurs most often in people that are immune compromised. But this is a serious illness but not a systemic inflammatory response. So choice d cross off as well and again, run a test and we're not quite sure of ourselves. Recognizing that mycosis ending would give you the clue that it's a fungal infection and therefore probably not what we're looking for. So we're left with sepsis and septic shock. So this is a little tricky because in both cases, we're talking about um system uh systemic issue. So body wide, very serious. But how do we distinguish between them? Well, when we just talk about a systemic inflammatory response, so the response itself, it's inflammatory and what we have is fever, rapid heart rate, rapid breathing and altered mental status. We're going to go with the slightly more general term of choice, a sepsis. So, in sepsis, the uh infection has managed what, no matter what the cause has managed to spread throughout the body. Usually because it's gotten in the bloodstream and the inflammatory system is reacting to this and causing all sorts of issues. When we look at septic shock, it's not our answer because it's a little more specific than sepsis in septic shock. You're talking about an advanced stage of sepsis that's become acutely, life threatening and specifically at the point where we've reached septic shock, we've had enough circulatory and cellular or metabolic abnormalities that it has caused a substantial drop in blood pressure. That's the um sort of the key feature when you're talking about shock. So when we look at our question, the fact that we don't talk about the symptom of this huge drop in blood pressure keys us in that we're talking about the more general term of sepsis and not the specific advanced stage of sepsis where you've reached this really critical point, blood pressure has dropped um definitely at risk of death. So our answer to systemic inflammatory response to infection where our symptoms are fever, rapid heart rate, rapid breathing and altered mental status would be choice a sepsis. See you in the next video.

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How are sepsis and septic shock related?

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