Epidemiology and impact on all-cause mortality of sepsis in Norwegian hospitals: A national retrospective study.

This study confirms that hospitalized sepsis is frequent in Norway and a major contributor to hospital fatalities in a European setting. The incidence is higher among men than women. Sepsis is in particular a disease of the elderly, and its impact on health-care will assumingly continue to increase in parallel with an aging population. Improvements in treatment and survival of sepsis could influence population mortality, and sepsis should receive greater attention in official death statistics in the future.