The 2021 Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines present a more conservative and simplified approach with fewer strong recommendations and lower quality of evidence compared to the 2016 version.
The Surviving Sepsis Campaign: international guidelines for management of sepsis and septic shock 2021 (2021 guidelines) was recently released. The guidelines summarized the evidences from literatures up to July 2019, and composed by 6 parts as "screening and early treatment", "infection", "hemodynamic management", "ventilation", "additional therapies" and "long-term outcomes and goals of care" with a total of 93 items and 99 recommendations. Compared with the 2016 guidelines (96 recommendations), although the total number of recommendations in the 2021 guidelines is similar, the number of "strong recommendations (recommend)" in 2021 guidelines has dropped significantly, as the number of "weak recommendations (suggest)" has increased significantly, and the level of the quality of evidence on which the recommendations are based has been significantly lowered. Furthermore, 2021 guidelines have also markedly deleted or simplified the recommendations regarding infection prevention, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) treatment, nutritional support and so on. While, the most obvious improvement appears in the segment of "long-term outcomes and goals of care", in which the patients and their families could get help in term of determining their physical rehabilitation and discharge follow-up plans and formulating exact goals of care. 2021 guidelines did not adopt new and emerging therapies or treatments, such as metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), diaphragm protective ventilation, timing of initiating renal replacement therapy for acute kidney injury, early mobility, endotoxin adsorption, tranexamic acid, E-medicine and telemedicine, big data and artificial intelligence and other new therapies. Collectively, it may suggest the 2021 guidelines tend to be conservative and simplified rather than fairly optimized and logicalized, which may arouse controversy in the future and affect clinician compliance.
Zheng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.