The components of Marik’s life-saving sepsis cocktail are simply steroids and vitamins, a therapy, which many have said is harmless, but may improve sepsis survival dramatically. Steroids for sepsis have been around decades, and although there have been several trials evaluating its benefits in the septic patient; it is safe to say that the use of steroids remains controversial. The recently completed HYPRESS trial did not demonstrate a benefit for steroids in patients with sepsis. How about the use of vitamin C and thiamine? This is not a new concept and there are studies demonstrating benefit so perhaps, combining all these “harmless” therapies would work on the deranged physiologic pathways that are present in the septic patient.
So the conjecture here is that Marik’s new cocktail has little patient harm because the individual components are individually benign and have been studied before. In fact, Marik himself has made the claim that withholding this therapy while waiting for a multicenter trial to be completed would be unethical. In support of his statement he has even invoked the infamous “parachute analogy” where some therapies are so obvious that it would be illogical to test them in a clinical trial.
Abstract
Adapted from (Marik et al 2016)
Background: The global burden of sepsis is estimated as 15 to 19 million cases annually
with a mortality rate approaching 60% in low income countries.
Methods: In this retrospective before-after clinical study, we compared the outcome and
clinical course of consecutive septic patients treated with intravenous vitamin C,
hydrocortisone and thiamine during a 7-month period (treatment group) compared to a
control group treated in our ICU during the preceding 7 months. The primary outcome was
hospital survival. A propensity score was generated to adjust the primary outcome.
Findings: There were 47 patients in both treatment and control groups with no significant
differences in baseline characteristics between the two groups. The hospital mortality was
8.5% (4 of 47) in the treatment group compared to 40.4% (19 of 47) in the control group (p
< 0.001). The propensity adjusted odds of mortality in the patients treated with the vitamin
C protocol was 0.13 (95% CI 0.04-0.48, p=002). The SOFA score decreased in all patients in
the treatment group with none developing progressive organ failure. Vasopressors were
weaned off all patients in the treatment group, a mean of 18.3 ± 9.8 hours after starting
treatment with vitamin C protocol. The mean duration of vasopressor use was 54.9 ± 28.4
hours in the control group (p<0.001).
Conclusion: Our results suggest that the early use of intravenous vitamin C, together with
corticosteroids and thiamine may prove to be effective in preventing progressive organ
dysfunction including acute kidney injury and reducing the mortality of patients with
severe sepsis and septic shock. Additional studies are required to confirm these
preliminary findings.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1127&context=bioelectrics_pubs
http://rebelem.com/the-marik-protocol-have-we-found-a-cure-for-severe-sepsis-and-septic-shock/
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