New Sepsis Guidelines Released!

It's been five years, y'all

Sepsis has an ontological problem—after hundreds of years, we still can’t coherently say what it is, and clinical intuition remains the primary criterion for its diagnosis.

The heterogeneity of sepsis and the shortcomings of diagnostic testing complicate clinical research and sap its rigor. Owing to these inherent limitations, there are very few high-quality clinical trials in sepsis.

Some commentators have been so outlandish as to suggest that sepsis care can (and even should) be distilled to providing antibiotics promptly, ensuring euvolemia, and maintaining perfusion with vasopressors, if needed, while pursuing source control and following culture data.

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With more than 5,400 studies on sepsis published in the past five years, though, surely there have been important recent discoveries ready for dissemination from the halls of academia to bedside clinical care in the community?

The Surviving Sepsis Campaign is the premier group that has tasked itself with periodically wrangling this expanding corpus of errant and unruly information into a set of statements that convey an impression of continuous evidence-based progress in sepsis care. Since the Campaign’s inception in 2001, its panelists have regularly analyzed sepsis research and issued recommendations governing multiple aspects of care, whose authority is undiminished by a lack of strong supporting evidence.

The most recent tranche of guidelines, issued in March 2026, includes “129 statements, with 46 being new statements not previously addressed, and more definitive recommendations” than the 2021 iteration.

We’ll put these under the microscope in future posts, but here are a few of the major takeaways from the new guidance.

PulmCCM is not affiliated with the Surviving Sepsis Campaign or any specialty society.

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