Academic Editor: Vijay Kumar
Background: Infections, major surgeries, and hyperinflammatory
syndromes are known to trigger Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS).
Discrimination between infectious and noninfectious inflammation often poses a
challenge in chronically ill patients with multiple comorbidities. These patients
are routinely treated with a variety of anti-infective medications before a
pathogen is identified. With the goal of improving pathogen detection rates and
interventions, we evaluated Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) as a highly
sensitive and fast means of detecting free microbial DNA in a small amount of
serum samples from children with ongoing SIRS. Methods: We describe
seven complex pediatric patients of SIRS or prolonged fever (