Reznik ME, et al. - The association between sepsis and the long-term risk of seizures was investigated. The clinicians found that compared with both the general population and other hospitalized patients, survivors of sepsis faced a significantly higher long-term risk of seizures. The findings proposed that sepsis was correlated with pathways that led to permanent neurologic sequelae.

• From 2005 to 2013, the clinicians performed a retrospective population-based cohort study using administrative claims data from all emergency department visits and hospitalizations at nonfederal acute care hospitals in California, Florida, and New York.
• They identified all adult patients hospitalized with sepsis using previously validated diagnosis codes.
• The outcome was any emergency department visit or hospitalization for seizure.
• They used poisson regression and demographic data to calculate age-, sex-, and race-standardized incidence rate ratios (IRR).
• They used a matched cohort of hospitalized patients without sepsis for comparison to confirm the findings and additionally evaluated claims data from a nationally representative 5% sample of Medicare beneficiaries.

• A total of 842,735 patients with sepsis were identified.
• In patients with sepsis, the annual incidence of seizure was 1.29% (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.27%-1.30%) vs 0.16% (95% CI 0.16%-0.16%) in the general population (IRR 4.98; 95% CI 4.92-5.04).
• A secondary analysis using matched hospitalized patients affirmed these findings (IRR 4.33; 95% CI 4.13-4.55), as did a separate analysis of Medicare beneficiaries, in whom the authors found a similar strength of association (IRR 2.72; 95% CI 2.60-2.83), as they did in patients ≥65 years of age in the primary statewide data (IRR 2.83; 95% CI 2.78-2.88).