Timing of Death in Children Referred for Intensive Care With Sepsis: Comparison of Two Cohorts in the United Kingdom, 2005–2011 vs. 2018–2023
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To review the timing of death in children with sepsis referred for intensive care, 2018-2023, and compare with our previous 2005-2011 practice. We hypothesized that most deaths occur within 24 hours of referral to the PICU, with many before PICU admission. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS: We reviewed referrals to the Children's Acute Transport Service (CATS), North Thames regional pediatric intensive care transport service in the United Kingdom, between January 2018 and March 2023. We included referrals of children (younger than 16 yr) with a working diagnosis of "sepsis," "severe sepsis," "septicemia," or "septic shock." The primary outcome measure was time to death up to a year after referral. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Over the 62-month study period, 11,231 referrals were made to CATS, and 330 (3%) met the study inclusion criteria. Outcome data were available on 272, of whom 29 (11%) died in the first year after referral, which compares favorably with our 2005-2011 cohort from the same service in which the 1-year mortality was 21% (130/627): mean difference 10% (95% CI, 4.8-14.6%), p value equals 0.0003. Eighteen of the 29 deaths occurred in the first 24 hours after referral. Amongst children with comorbidities 12 of 139 (9%) died compared to 6 of 133 (5%) previously healthy children ( p = 0.22 Fisher exact test, odds ratio [OR] 2.0 with 95% CI, 0.73-5.5). By 1 year, mortality in children with comorbidities was 19 of 139 (13.9%) vs. mortality in previously healthy children of 10 of 133 (7.5%) ( p = 0.12; OR 1.8 [95% CI, 0.82-4.1]). CONCLUSIONS: In 2018-2023, the proportion of referrals for PICU retrieval with a clinical diagnosis of "sepsis" was low at 3%. As with our 2005-2011 cohort, most deaths occurred within 24 hours of first referral. Therefore, early recognition and resuscitation still have the greatest potential for improving sepsis outcomes, which has implications for clinical trials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".