Odds ratio and its 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measurement of the clinical impact of the predictor variables. A P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Statistical analyses were performed with SPSS 17.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA), NCSS 2000 (Kaysville, selleck DAPT secretase UT, USA), and Statistic 8.0 (Tulsa, OK, USA).ResultsBaseline characteristics of 186 patients with severe sepsis and 50 age- and sex-matched controls are shown in Table Table1.1. Higher sCD40L levels were observed in the group of patients with severe sepsis compared with controls (P = 0.01) (Table (Table11).Table 1Comparison between patients with severe sepsis and controlsNon-surviving septic patients (n = 62) showed higher sCD40L levels (P = 0.04) than survivors (n = 124) after the 30-day follow-up.

Non-surviving patients also showed a higher incidence of diabetes mellitus (P = 0.02), higher lactatemia (P < 0.001), higher SOFA (P < 0.001) and APACHE-II (P < 0.001) scores, and lower platelet count (P = 0.002) and IL-10 (P < 0.001) than surviving patients (Table (Table22).Table 2Demographic and clinical parameters of survivors and non-survivors patients with severe sepsisWe did not find differences in 30-day survival between those patients that received statins before sepsis compared with those that did not receive statins (Table (Table2).2). After the diagnosis of sepsis, none of the patients continued receiving statins.We did not find significant differences in sCD40L serum levels according to sex, diabetes mellitus status, COPD, use of statins before sepsis diagnosis, personal history of ischemic heart disease, need for mechanical ventilation and presence of septic shock (Table (Table3).

3). Neither did we find significant differences in sCD40L serum levels according to the site and source of infection (Table (Table44).Table 3Serum levels of sCD40L according to clinical variablesTable 4Serum levels of sCD40L according to the site and source of infectionLogistic regression analysis showed that serum sCD40L levels ��3.5 ng/mL, lactatemia, APACHE-II score and platelet count <60,000/mm3 were associated with death at Day 30 (Table (Table55).Table 5Multiple logistic regression analysis of variables to predict 30-day mortalitySurvival analysis showed that patients with sCD40L levels ��3.5 ng/mL presented higher mortality during the 30-day period than patients with lower levels (Chi-square: 4.

50; P = 0.03) (Figure (Figure11).Figure 1Survival curves at 30 days using sCD40L levels higher or lower than 3.5 ng/mL.The areas under the curves (AUC) for each predictor of mortality were the following: sCD40L ��3.5 ng/mL (AUC = 0.58; 95% CI = 0.51 to 0.65; P = 0.03), lactatemia (AUC = 0.66; 95% CI = 0.59 to 0.73; P < 0.001) and APACHE-II (AUC = 0.70; 95% CI = 0.62 to 0.76; P < 0.001) (Figure (Figure22).Figure 2Receiver operation characteristic analysis using sCD40L levels Anacetrapib �� 3.