In vitro diagnosis of sepsis: a review

Abstract

Sepsis, severe sepsis and septic shock, systemic inflammatory response, and other related manifestations represent a relevant medical problem with high morbidity and mortality, despite the improvements in diagnosis, treatment, and preventive measures over the last few decades. The limited knowledge of the pathophysiology in association with the lack of in vitro diagnostic methods for the certain and quick determination of the causative microbiological agents and their antibiotic resistance means the condition is still critical and of high impact in health care. The current gold standard method to detect the sepsis-causing pathogens, which is based on blood culture, is still insufficiently sensitive and slow. The new culture-independent molecular biology-based techniques can lead to the identification of a broad range of microorganisms and resistance markers within a few hours and with high sensitivity and specificity; nevertheless, limitations of, for example, the polymerase chain reaction-based methods still hamper their application in the clinical routine. This review summarizes the in vitro diagnostic methods and their approach in the clinical diagnosis of the bloodstream infections, and explores their advantages and disadvantages at the current state of the art. A quick analysis of the future prospective in multiplex technologies for microbiological diagnosis of sepsis is also provided.

Antimicrobial peptide arrays for wide spectrum sensing of pathogenic bacteria

“…However, it requires isolated colonies of the pathogen to be grown on a solid medium and thus can only be performed several days after enrichment of the sample. Owing to these considerations, new technologies enabling faster diagnostics are still emerging, promising simple and low-cost onfield implementation [4,5]. Amongst other alternatives under research, biosensors able to detect whole viable cells directly from a suspect sample are very promising.…”

Tick-borne zoonoses and commonly used diagnostic methods in human and veterinary medicine

“…Courtney et al 2004 ; Reller and Dumler 2018 ), while a broad-panel system for the simultaneous detection of nine tick-borne pathogens is currently available for research use only (Buchan et al 2019 ). For patients suspected of sepsis, multiplex real-time qPCRs for simultaneous amplification of a wide range of pathogens have been developed (Guido et al 2016 ); however, not all of them detect tick-borne pathogens. Recently, multiplex PCR followed by electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (PCR/ESI-MS) has been used to diagnose early B. burgdorferi s.s. (Eshoo et al 2012 ), Ehrlichia spp.…”

Antimicrobial Peptides as Probes in Biosensors Detecting Whole Bacteria: A Review

“…We propose in Table 3 a non-exhaustive comparison of the main techniques used in pathogen detection in clinical settings-during bloodstream infections for instance. For most of the entries, a review by Guido et al gives an overview of the commercially available systems [100]. State-of-the-art reviews can also give an in-depth understanding of the methods used to detect bacteria in a clinical context [24,[101][102][103].…”