Sepsis is a severe disease with a high mortality rate. Identification and treatment in the initial hours of the disease improve outcomes. Some biomarkers like procalcitonin and C-reactive protein are used for diagnosis and to access sepsis prognosis and they can help in clinical decision-making, but none has sufficient specificity or sensitivity to be routinely employed in clinical practice. This review seeks to evaluate lipid metabolism alterations in patients with sepsis and the possibility of using the respective metabolites as biomarkers of the disease. A search of the main electronic biomedical databases was conducted for the 20-year period ending in February 2020, focused on primary research articles on biomarkers in sepsis. The keywords included sepsis, septic shock, biomarker, metabolomic, lipidomic and lysophosphatidylcoline.. It concludes that altered lipid profiles, along with the progress of the disease should provide new insights, enabling a better understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms and making it possible to design new early diagnosis and therapeutic procedures for sepsis.
Keywords: Biomarker; Lipidomic; Lysophosphatidylcoline; Metabolomic; Sepsis; Septic shock.