Multiple Organ Failure in Septic Shock

Abstract

In the late 1960s several reports appeared describing remote organ failure (e.g., pulmonary or liver failure) as a complication of severe sepsis (Clowes et al. 1968; Skillman et al. 1969). Stimulated by the observation of Tilney et al. (1973) that sequential failure of initially uninvolved organ systems may follow operations for ruptured aortic aneurysm, the concept emerged that severe injury can result in damage to distant organ systems. In a classical editorial by Baue (1975) entitled“Multiple, Progressive or Sequential Systems Failure: A Syndrome of the 1970s,”this concept was formulated as the basis of a“new”clinical syndrome. Several terms were coined thereafter, such as multiple organ failure (Eiseman et al. 1977), multiple system(s) organ failure (Border et al. 1976), and multiple organ system failure (Bell et al. 1983), to describe this evolving clinical syndrome of otherwise unexplained progressive physiological failure of several interdependent organ systems. More recently the term multiple organ dysfunction syndrome has been proposed as a more appropriate description (Bone et al. 1992).