Like a poison pen, dying cells prick their neighbors with a lethal message. This may worsen sepsis, Vijay Rathinam and colleagues in the UConn School of Medicine report in the Jan. 23 issue of Cell. Their findings could lead to a new understanding of this dangerous illness.

Sepsis is one of the most frequent causes of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), killing 11 million people each year. It’s characterized by runaway inflammation, usually sparked by an infection. It can lead to shock, multiple organ failure, and death if treatment is not rapid enough or effective.

But recent research has shown that it isn’t actually the infection that causes the spiraling inflammation: it’s the cells caught up in it. Even if those cells aren’t infected, they act as if they are, and die. As they die, they send out messages to other cells. Those messages somehow cause the recipient cells to die.

If scientists understood what caused this deadly message chain, they might be able to stop it. And that could help heal sepsis.

The deadly message mystery may now be solved. It appears that the “messages” are a byproduct of the cells trying to stay alive.

  • Elrecoal19
    2•5 hours ago

    Yeah, used to think evolution was always upwards towards a “superior form”,after seeing some memes about pokemon evolutions and actual evolutions I started understanding that it’s basically “whatever sticks at the moment”. If being weak and stupid helped us survive more than being strong and intelligent, the species will tend to that, right?

    • @[email protected]
      1•51 minutes ago

      Yep basically. It’s all environment dependent. We need fancy scuba gear to survive for much longer than 30-60sec (discounting the breath divers that can do a few minutes), and we wouldn’t make it for very long in Antarctica without winter clothes and heated bases. Meanwhile, sea turtles can sleep underwater for hours and survive in the Arctic with nothing but their inherent biology, but I doubt they’d get very far from the shore before those skills became useless on land without legs.

      Humans aren’t better than sea turtles just because we can muck about on land, and sea turtles aren’t better than humans just because they can live in the oceans. It’s all relative to which creatures can survive in their given environment long enough to reproduce.