Background: Sepsis affects over 30 million people worldwide each year, causing approximately 6 million deaths. Challenges in clinical diagnosis and the need for an early diagnosis to prevent mortality due to sepsis have led to dependence on inflammatory biomarkers like Procalcitonin (PCT), C-reactive protein (CRP), and Interleukin-6 (IL-6). Objective: This study was performed to observe the contribution of inflammatory biomarkers in the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with surgical sepsis. Methods: We performed a retrospective observational study in a Clinical Emergency Hospital, which included a number of 125 patients with surgical sepsis admitted between January 2020 and December 2021. The patients were included in the study based on the Sepsis-3 definition. PCT, CRP, IL-6, Sepsis-related Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score, Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), the time up to surgery, the days of treatment in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and the total days of hospitalization had been statistically analyzed. Results: The mean age of all patients was 65.14 years. The mean value in all patients for PCT was 20.08 ng/mL, for CRP was 175.42 mg/l, and for IL-6 was 799.6 pg/mL. The strongest correlation between biomarkers was between CRP and IL-6 (r = 0.425; p < 0.0001). Of all biomarkers, the CRP correlated the strongest with patient outcomes (r = 0.544; p < 0.0001). The area under curve (AUC) for the mean values of the inflammatory biomarkers was calculated and the best diagnostic performance was for CRP with 0.816 (95% CI: 0.744– 0.887). Conclusion: CRP and IL-6 were the most efficient in sepsis diagnosis. The association of PCT, CRP and IL-6 has increased the range of certainty in sepsis diagnosis. CRP was the most efficient biomarker in the prognosis of sepsis.
13 October 2020 in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine
The scope of the study was to identify the associated risk factors of lower limb lymphedema development in cervical and endometrial cancer patients. We retrospectively analysed 326 patients: 186 cases (57.06%) with cervical cancer and 140 cases (42.94%) with endometrial cancer were treated in Surgery, Radiotherapy, Oncology and Gynaecology Clinics of ‘St. Apostle Andrew’ Emergency Clinical Hospital Galati over 9 years. Adjuvant radiotherapy was performed in 83.57% of endometrial cancer cases. Adjuvant chemotherapy was performed in 45.16% of cervical cancer cases. Over 10 lymph nodes were removed in 74.73% of cervical cancer patients. Incidence of lymphedema was 15.05% in cervical cancer patients and 10% in endometrial cancer patients, P=0.06. Analysed risk factors for lower limb lymphedema occurrence were: Age, disease stage, radiotherapy, number of invaded lymph nodes (for cervical cancer patients), number of removed lymph nodes (for cervical cancer patients) and obesity. Multivariate analysis for associated risk factors of lower limb lymphedema development in cervical cancer showed that number of removed lymph nodes, OR=2.109 (0.907‑4.903), P<0.0001, number of lymph nodes with metastasis, OR=1.903 (0.253‑4.332), P=0.004 and obesity, OR=1.713 (0.226‑2.967), P=0.006 were found as statistically significant risk factors for lower limb lymphedema onset. For endometrial cancer patients, obesity, OR=1.518 (0.721‑2.75), P=0.0003, was the only associated risk factor with statistical significance for the lower limb lymphedema development. Lower limb lymphedema represents one of the adverse reactions of multimodal treatment in gynaecological cancers which affects patient's quality of life. Lower limb lymphedema occurrence is related with number of risk factors, the most important being removed lymph nodes, obesity and radiotherapy.