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Roger C. Bone, MD
Rush-Presbyterian-St Luke's Medical Center Chicago, Ill

JAMA. 1993;270(8):939.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—The American College of Chest Physicians/Society of Critical Care Medicine held their consensus conference on the issue of definitions in sepsis in order to develop a terminology stressing the point that these conditions result from the body's own inflammatory responses.^1,2 The new terms systemic inflammatory response syndrome and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome represent two separate phenomena that may share a common physiological basis—the runaway inflammatory response.

The term systemic inflammatory response syndrome should be considered as a more sensitive definition for the clinical entity that was previously termed the sepsis syndrome, while multiple organ dysfunction syndrome is comparable with what was frequently termed multiple organ failure (or any of a number of similar terms). An important difference here is that multiple organ dysfunction syndrome defines a continuum of dysfunctions, while the older terms are categorical definitions.

Systemic inflammatory response syndrome was purposefully provided with a broad definition, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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