When I was first diagnosed with thyroid cancer, I didn't feel any odd lumps or nodules in my neck, but I was suffering from muscle weakness, tiredness and getting constant colds. After a particularly nasty bug I noticed that my lymph nodes never seemed to go down in size.
SIRS is nonspecific and can be caused by ischemia, inflammation, trauma, infection, or several insults combined. Thus, SIRS is not always related to infection. Venn diagram showing overlap of infection, bacteremia, sepsis, systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), and multiorgan dysfunction.
Previously, SIRS criteria had been used to define sepsis. If the SIRS criteria is negative, it is very unlikely the person has sepsis; if it is positive, there is just a moderate probability that the person has sepsis. According to SIRS, there were different levels of sepsis: sepsis, severe sepsis, and septic shock. The definition of SIRS is shown below: SIRS is the presence of two or more of the following: abnormal body temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, or blood gas, and white blood cell count. Sepsis is defined as SIRS in response to an infectious process.