Sepsis kills more people than car accidents, breast cancer, and bowel cancer combined. The key areas integral for ensuring improvements in the care of sepsis patients include improved risk stratification, better microorganism identification techniques, and a reduction in the burden of second-hit nosocomial infections. This work addresses each of these key areas in turn, with the ultimate aim of improving patient care through applied translation research. Firstly, this work will combine small-scale yet complex immunological data with new statistical modelling techniques to form a new approach to microbe identification based on “immune fingerprints”. This new approach will allow discrimination between Grampositive and Gram-negative infecting organisms using a small set of immune markers suitable for development into point-of-care technology. These immune fingerprints will also be used to improve the diagnosis of sepsis and provide risk stratification models. Secondly, this thesis will offer new insights into immunosuppression that may impact upon current and future clinical trials. Specifically, it will suggest that aminobisphosphonates may help in the treatment of sepsis related-immunosuppression and that sepsis neutrophils gain the ability to act as antigen presenting cells.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:637130 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Morgan, Matthew Philip |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/70408/ |
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