Fundamental limitations in both animal and patient
models have contributed to a lack of therapeutic progress
in human sepsis. Surgery provides a biologically
and clinically relevant model that avoids many such
limitations. This human model enables the investigation
of a timed, major inflammatory insult in highly
phenotyped patients serving as their own control.
Beyond the biological modelling of sepsis on the initial
surgical insult, sepsis syndrome is sufficiently common
and predictable within the large numbers of patients
undergoing surgical procedures to enable cohort studies
of sepsis itself.