Figure 1.

Mortality related to duration of organ dysfunction (DOD). DOD represents the time elapsed from the onset of organ dysfunction to the time of diagnosis in patients with severe sepsis and septic shock. As there was no difference in mortality between patients with a DOD of zero or one day (p=0.49), or between patients with a DOD of two, three, or four days (p=0,66), this variable was grouped as less than 48 hours and more than 48 hours of organ dysfunction in the multivariate analysis. In this analysis, only a DOD of longer than 48 hours was correlated with mortality (p=0.004)