Trauma, sepsis, and the immune response.

Burn patients, multiple trauma patients, and patients undergoing major surgical operations often suffer from acquired immunologic deficits that predispose them to life-threatening sepsis. This paper reviews the current research in this area, with emphasis on identifying the components of the immune response affected by injury, elucidating the mediators of immunologic change, and determining new therapeutic approaches for correcting immunologic deficits. Lessons learned from the study of immune deficiency disease are reviewed, as are basic observations of burn- and trauma-induced immune depression.