ATLANTA, June 14 (UPI) -- U.S. hospitalized patients with a cancer history have a ten-fold increased risk of acquiring and dying from sepsis, a severe immune response to an infection.
Using data from 1979 to 2001 of 854 million hospitalizations from the National Hospital Discharge Survey, researchers at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta found that of the 76.7 million involving a coexisting diagnosis of cancer malignancy, nearly 11 million involved sepsis.
Sepsis occurred in 2.3 percent of all the cancer patients, or 1.7 million patients and rose in cases, from 24,150 in 1979 to 87,160 in 2001, representing an increase of 261 percent during the study period.
Of the sepsis patients with a history of cancer, gastrointestinal malignancies were most common at 24.4 percent, followed by lung cancer at 20 percent, lymphoma at 14.1 percent, prostate at 9.3 percent and breast cancer at 8.8 percent. Patients with pancreatic cancer were found to have the highest incidence of sepsis, even greater than for leukemia, according to the study published in Chest.
Previous Emory studies have concluded that sepsis is an increasingly common and life-threatening condition in the United States and the tenth leading cause of death.
