Proposed criteria for diagnosing sepsis in kids good for data collection but not bedside care

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-03-22 02:00

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A proposed criteria for the diagnosis of sepsis in children can be useful for tracking cases and comparing populations but it is unlikely to become a tool that will help healthcare professionals directly, according to Australian researchers. The team tested the Phoenix Sepsis Score with over 6000 Australian children with suspected community-acquired sepsis and found it performed similarly to previous testing of the score. Only a small proportion of the children met the criteria, the researchers say, with almost half of in-hospital deaths among children who did not fit the criteria.

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Dr Elliot Long is lead author of the paper and is an emergency medicine specialist at Royal Children's Hospital and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute

Diagnosing sepsis in children is a major problem. To address this problem, the novel "Phoenix Criteria' have been proposed. We evaluated the performance of the Phoenix Criteria using data from the Sepsis Epidemiology in Australian and New Zealand Children (SENTINEL) study conducted through the Paediatric Research in Emergency Department International Collaborative (PREDICT) network.

We found that the accuracy of the Phoenix Criteria was similar in our study to the original study. The Phoenix Criteria are important for comparing populations and benchmarking care. However, we found that they missed almost 50% of deaths from sepsis, and that very few children with sepsis actually met the Phoenix Criteria - underestimating the burden of sepsis on hospitals. The criteria were not designed for bedside clinicians trying to decide who to treat for sepsis.

Last updated: 21 Mar 2025 12:30pm

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Declared conflicts of interest None declared.

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Research JAMA, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends

Journal/
conference: JAMA Network Open

Organisation/s: Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI), The University of Melbourne, Griffith University, The University of Queensland, The University of Sydney, The University of Adelaide, Monash University, The University of New South Wales, The University of Western Australia

Funder: This study is funded in part by an MRFF grant (No. GNT1190814) and an NHMRC grant (No. GNT2017605). Dr Long is funded by a Royal Children’s Hospital Clinician-Scientist Fellowship and an NHMRC Investigator Grant (No. GNT2034194). Dr Babl is funded by a grant from the Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation and an NHMRC investigator grant (No. GNT2017605).

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