Investigating the microenvironment in SSc patients with severe sepsis
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating the ischaemic microenvironment in scleroderma patients with severe sepsis
IRAS ID
184256
Contact name
Richard J Stratton
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Scleroderma is an autoimmune condition resulting in thickening and scarring of the connective tissue under the skin and around blood vessels and internal organs. Sepsis is a common clinical problem and one of the leading causes of illness and death worldwide; it is a complication frequently seen during inpatient admissions of scleroderma patients. However, there is little published data regarding this feature of the disease, and mortality due to infectious complications of scleroderma remains high.
This project aims to describe sepsis in scleroderma including patient characteristics, preceding treatment, and outcome including length of hospital stay, mortality, and end organ damage. We wish to determine which cells are being recruited into the tissues during sepsis in patients with scleroderma compared to patients without. Our third study group includes scleroderma patients without sepsis and we will also study a fourth group of patients without scleroderma and without sepsis, to establish how responses in controls differ from those with sepsis.
The method used in this research is the suction blister method – a small amount of pressure (suction) is applied to the forearm skin of patients, for up to 3 hours, to create a small blister which gives us a fluid sample for analysis; the method is painless and non-scarring. A small needle will be used to take a sample of the fluid from the blister. The fluid will then be analysed for various inflammatory proteins, along with a matched blood sample from each participant, allowing us to seek a correlation between the levels of these proteins and outcome in the above mentioned patient groups; thereby testing the hypothesis that local tissue responses have an important role in the host response to sepsis.REC name
London - Bloomsbury Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/1978
Date of REC Opinion
18 Feb 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion