Figure 1.

Each patient follows their own trajectory of immune response activation during the course of sepsis, rather than all following the same pattern. The early response is usually proinflammatory and the later response immunosuppressive, but there are exceptions, and the time course can vary substantially from one patient to the other. The arrows indicate some examples of time points at which an anti-inflammatory strategy may be beneficial (1 and perhaps 2) and others when it may be harmful (3 and 4).