Patients
A total of 170 patients were recruited from Zhejiang Provincial People’s
Hospital from March 2019 to October 2020. The inclusion criteria were
age > 18 years and suspicion of BSI. Suspected BSI was
defined if the patient had a sudden high fever (T ≥ 38.5 °C) accompanied
by hemodynamic instability that could not be explained by a
site-specific infection at another body site. In addition, the recruited
patient also presented life-threatening organ dysfunction with an
increase of 2 points or more in the sepsis-related organ failure
assessment score (Warhurst, et al., 2015, Timsit, et al., 2020). The
demographic and clinical characteristics of each patient were collected
within the first 24 h of suspicion of BSI and summarized inTable 3 . Telephone follow-up interviews were conducted with
surviving patients. An unfavorable outcome was defined as 28-day
all-cause mortality after ICU admission. This study was approved by the
Institutional Review Board and the Ethics Committee of Zhejiang
Provincial People’s Hospital (No. 2019KY002). All patients provided
informed written consent.