Much Ado About Nothing? The Relevance of New Sepsis Definitions for Clinical Care Versus Research

What's in a name?  That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Act II Scene II

The Society of Critical Care Medicine is meeting this week, JAMA devoted an entire issue to sepsis and critical illness, and my twitter feed is ablaze with news of release of a new consensus definition of sepsis.  Much laudable work has been done to get to this point, even as the work is already generating controversy (Is this a "first world" definition that will be forced upon second and third world countries where it may have less external validity?  Why were no women on the panel?).  Making the definition of sepsis more reliable, from a sensitivity and specificity standpoint (more accurate) is a step forward for the sepsis research enterprise, for it will allow improved targeting of inclusion criteria for trials of therapies for sepsis, and better external validity when those therapies are later applied in a population that resembles those enrolled.  But what impact will/should the new definition have on clinical care?  Are the-times-they-are-a-changing?

Diagnosis, a fundamental goal of clinical medicine is important for several reasons, chief among them:

1. To identify the underlying cause of symptoms and signs so that treatments specific to that illness can be administered
2. To provide information on prognosis, natural history, course, etc for patients with or without treatment
3. To reassure the physician and patients that there is an understanding of what is going on; information itself has value even if it is not actionable

Thus redefining sepsis (or even defining it in the first place) is valuable if it allows us to institute treatments that would not otherwise be instituted, or provides prognostic or other information that is valuable to patients.  Does it do either of those two things?

Sause for the Goose, Sauce for the Gander: Low Tidal Volume Ventilation in the Operating Theatre

PIBW is based on height, not weight.

Following my usual procedure, I read the title and abstract of the methods of this article on Intraoperative Low Tidal Volume Ventilation in this week's NEJM, and I made a wager with myself on what the outcome would be.  Because there are both biological plausibility and biological precedent for low tidal volume, and because it is one of the few interventions in critical care in which I have supreme confidence (yes, you can conclude that I'm biased), my prior probability for this intervention is high and I wagered that the study would be positive.  If you have not already done so, read the methods in the abstract and make your own wager before you read on.

This trial is solid but not bombproof.  Outcomes assessors were blinded and so were post-operative care providers, but anesthesiologists administering tidal volumes were not.  Outcomes themselves, while mostly based on consensus definitions (sometimes a consensus of collective ignorance), are susceptible to ascertainment and misclassification biases.  The outcome was a composite, something that I like, as will be elaborated in a now published letter in AJRCCM.  A composite outcome allows an additive effect between component outcomes and effectively increases study power.  This is essential in a study such as this, where only 400 patients were enrolled and the study had "only" 80% power to detect a reduction in the primary outcome from 20% to 10%.  As we have shown, detecting a difference of this magnitude in mortality is a difficult task indeed, and most critical care studies seeking such a difference are effectively underpowered.  How many effective (in some aspect other than mortality) therapies have been dismissed because of this systemic underpowering in critical care research is anybody's guess.