The Association Between Sepsis Morbidity & Mortality and Sex

Sigler, Matthew

The Association Between Sepsis Morbidity & Mortality and Sex

Author(s)

Sigler, Matthew

Date Issued

April 25, 2025

Abstract

Sepsis is an extremely dangerous inflammatory condition that stems from an aggressive immune response to infections that takes hundreds of thousands of lives and costs billions of dollars to treat each year. To better understand how this condition affects different individuals, I conducted a retrospective cohort study analysing the risk of sepsis in males and females. The study sample was composed of septic patients from Meadville Medical Center from 2018-2022. Dependent variables taken into account included initial diagnosis of sepsis severity, outcome of sepsis, progression to septic shock, ICU admission status, length of hospital stay, length of ICU stay, number of days on a ventilator, number of days without a ventilator, and age. T-tests and chi squared (𝛘^2) tests were used to determine if the relationship between these individual variables and sex were statistically significant. Then, linear and logistic regression models were used to control for other variables and determine which of the aforementioned dependent variables have a greater chance of affecting one sex more than the other. The results of the study found no statistically significant difference between sex and septic challenges, with the only variable seeming to have any relationship with sex being the age of the septic patients.

Major

Biology

Honors

Biology, 2025

First Reader(s)

Dawson, Rebecca S.