A suitable design for characterizing the risk factors associated with sepsis is a population-based cohort with baseline information on each individual coupled with prospective longitudinal surveillance for incident sepsis events. This study confirms the association of baseline chronic medical conditions with the risk of future sepsis events. While prior studies have linked medical comorbidities with severity of sepsis or degree of organ dysfunction, there have been no efforts connecting these conditions at stable baseline with risk of future sepsis events. The findings of this study may prove useful in sepsis care, WY 14643 msds pointing to risk detection, stratification and reduction as potential sepsis management strategies. Risk prevention and reduction strategies have proven effective for common medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease and stroke.. We emphasize that this study identifies associations between baseline chronic medical conditions and sepsis but does not indicate a causal relationship. However, there are possible pathophysiologic connections between chronic medical conditions and the future risk of sepsis. Numerous common conditions have been associated with chronic inflammation, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease and smoking, among others. Inflammation plays a central role in sepsis pathophysiology, and chronic inflammation could raise the risk of progression to sepsis when subjected to a bacterial pathogen. Associations between vascular disease and sepsis have not been previously described but are plausible given the role of endothelial dysfunction in sepsis pathophysiology.. The notion of sepsis prevention is also plausible given the mutable nature of many of the risk factors identified in this study. For example, hypertension and dyslipidemia control are possible through pharmacotherapy and have resulted in large reductions in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. Glycemic control may limit sequelae of diabetes as well as the risk of pneumonia hospitalization. Smoking cessation is an important strategy for reducing cardiovascular risk and could yield similar benefits for sepsis risk reduction. Outside of these conditions, aggressive vaccination strategies may provide another approach for curtailing disease. While seeming to overlap with risk factors already identified for other diseases, the identification of new relationships with sepsis is important because health behavior changes may be motivated differently by different medical conditions. Most importantly, our study confirms that an individual’s risk of sepsis is associated with the number of chronic medical conditions present. Therefore, if causal relationships were confirmed, mitigation of a combination of risk factors might reduce lifetime sepsis risk. Our study offers additional perspectives of sepsis epidemiology and its risk factors. For example, half of the sepsis in this series involved infection types other than pneumonia. Diabetes and chronic kidney disease have been associated with increased sepsis mortality; our study suggests that increased sepsis attack rates may partially explain the increased sepsis mortality in these subgroups. While recent studies highlight the increased risk of acute atrial fibrillation and stroke following a sepsis event, our study indicates that baseline atrial fibrillation and stroke are also precursors for sepsis. In contrast to studies suggesting a protective role from dyslipidemia, our study indicates that baseline dyslipidemia is clearly associated with an increased risk of sepsis.. We also observed some unexpected findings. In contrast to prior studies, we did not detect a gender disparity in incident sepsis.