Immunologic dissonance and its clinical significance in sepsis

Sepsis is essentially a result from immunological dissonance provoked by severe insults such as fulminant infection, severe trauma and extensive burns. It or iginates from excessive inflammatory responses and develops into immune paralysis or immunosupression. It has been demonstrated that cellular immune response plays a v ital role in the pathogenesis of sepsis. In the stage of excessive inflammation, several kinds of immune cells are activated by pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) and subsequently produce a vast number of pro-inflammatory cytokines, while during the stage of immune paralysis, excessive apoptosis could result in decrease of immune cells w ith functional compromise. Inhibitor y or regulator y immune cell subsets eventually dominate the direction of immune response and the production of inhibitory cytokines is enhanced. For clinical practice, surveillance of changes and shift in overall immune function is a basis for immunotherapy, especially to immunomodulation therapy. However, there is still a lack of adequate indexes or markers for integral evaluation of host immune state in the development of sepsis. DOI: 10.11855/j.issn.0577-7402.2017.02.02