Half of people who develop blood poisoning, otherwise known as sepsis, are dead within a couple of years, a new study finds.

A little more than 50% of patients admitted to an ER with sepsis died within two years, Danish researchers report.

“We found that certain factors increased the risk of death after sepsis, including, not surprisingly, advanced age,” said Finn Nielsen, a senior scientist of clinical epidemiology at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark.

“Additionally, conditions such as dementia, heart disease, cancer and previous hospitalization with sepsis within the last six months before admission also elevated the risk of dying during a median follow-up period of two years,” Nielsen added in a hospital news release.

For the study, researchers tracked outcomes among patients admitted to Aarhus University Hospital with sepsis between October 2017 and March 2018.

“Our study relied on a sepsis database, which provided valuable information based on prospectively collected patient data,” Nielsen said. “Unlike frequently used routine registry data, this approach minimized errors, and allowed for more accurate and detailed insights into sepsis effects.”

The researchers identified 714 patients who developed sepsis during that time.

After an average two years, 361 had died – not just from sepsis, but from any cause.

Old age increased a person’s risk of sepsis by 4% for every additional year of age, researchers found.

Further, a history of cancer more than doubled a person’s risk of death, clogged arteries increased risk by 39%, and dementia increased risk by 90%, results show.

People with repeated bouts of sepsis also were 48% more likely to die, based on data from hospital patients previously admitted with sepsis within the past six months.

“We believe this knowledge is useful for both clinicians and researchers in the field of acute medicine,” Nielsen said. “Recognizing that sepsis is a serious illness with high mortality is crucial.”

However, larger studies are needed, given that this research was done at a single hospital, Nielsen noted.

“Similar but larger studies of sepsis-related outcomes need to be repeated across departments, regions and countries to obtain a comprehensive epidemiological picture of sepsis,” Nielsen said.

Neilsen presented these findings at the European Society for Emergency Medicine’s annual meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“Sepsis is a serious and potentially fatal medical condition. The incidence of sepsis is increasing in several countries, yet so far, there has been limited, reliable information about long-term outcomes for patients who develop sepsis,” Dr. Barbra Backus, chair of the society’s abstract selection, said in a meeting news release.

“This study has shown certain risk factors that should alert clinicians to the risk of patients with sepsis at an increased risk of dying, so that they can monitor them and follow them up more closely,” added Backus, an emergency physician in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research.

Findings presented at a medical meeting should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed article.