Application of the Sepsis-3 criteria to describe sepsis epidemiology in the Amsterdam UMCdb intensive care dataset

Introduction Sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In the updated, 2016 Sepsis-3 criteria, sepsis is defined as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection, where organ dysfunction can be represented by an increase in the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score of 2 points or more. We sought to apply the Sepsis-3 criteria the characterise the septic cohort in the Amsterdam University Medical Centres database (Amsterdam UMCdb). Methods We examined adult intensive care unit (ICU) admissions in the Amsterdam UMCdb, which contains de-identified data for patients admitted to a mixed surgical-medical ICU at a tertiary academic medical centre in the Netherlands. We operationalised the Sepsis-3 criteria, defining organ dysfunction as an increase in the SOFA score of 2 points or more, while infection was defined as a new course of antibiotics or an escalation in antibiotic therapy, with at least one antibiotic given intravenously. Patients with sepsis were determined to be in septic shock if they additionally required the use of vasopressors and had a lactate level >2 mmol/L. Results We identified 18,221 ICU admissions from 16,408 patients in our cohort. There were 6,371 unique sepsis episodes, of which 30.1% met the criteria for septic shock. A total of 4,958/6,371 sepsis (77.8%) episodes occurred on ICU admission. Forty-eight percent of emergency medical admissions and 37.0% of emergency surgical admissions were for sepsis. Overall, there was a 12.5% ICU mortality rate; patients with septic shock had a higher ICU mortality rate (38.5%) than those without shock (11.3%). Conclusions We successfully operationalised the Sepsis-3 criteria to the Amsterdam UMCdb, allowing the characterization and comparison of sepsis epidemiology across different centres.