Paediatric sepsis and septic shock diagnoses should no longer be based on systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria, according to an international team of doctors.

Instead, they recommend using the new Phoenix Sepsis Score — which measures cardiovascular, neurological, respiratory and/or coagulation dysfunction — when diagnosing sepsis in children.

The University of Zurich–led team, which developed the criteria, said a score of at least two reliably identified potentially life-threatening organ dysfunction in children with suspected infection.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), they also defined septic shock as sepsis with cardiovascular dysfunction, such as severe hypotension for age, blood lactate greater than 5mmol/L or needing vasoactive medication.