Predictive medicine: severe trauma and burns.

Severe trauma and burn injury are often associated with a life-threatening systemic inflammatory response, only to be followed by severe infections. Although many parameters of the immune system are depressed or altered, only the innate immune system has been directly correlated with infections in these patients. The innate immune system plays an important role in both the inflammatory response and defense against infections. These types of sequelae suggest that at any particular point in time, depending upon the patient status, either a hyperactive or suppressed polymorphonuclear neutrophil (PMN) response may be detected. In fact, this dichotomy has been shown to occur in numerous published studies. Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.