What is sepsis?

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Eric Adkins, MD: When you think about what sepsis is, sepsis is really this abnormal response to an infection that the body has. It creates a wide cascade of inflammation throughout the body, throughout the various body organs, and at times, the body will have this overactive response to that infection. You'll hear medical personnel maybe call it like a dysregulated immune response. So it's a very abnormal immune response to an infection, and you'll have moments where people can respond to an infectious insult where everything goes really well, everything's normal. So if you get a sore throat, that things will get better and get better quickly as you normally would. But other times, if you get sicker with something, even perhaps like a pneumonia that even though you've mounted an immune response to that infection, sometimes it gets really bad and it starts to involve other parts of the body. That's when you start thinking about sepsis.

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