Clinician observation of physiological trend monitoring to identify late-onset sepsis in preterm infants.

Aim: To determine whether trends in routinely collected physiological variables can be used retrospectively to classify infants according to the presence or absence of late-onset neonatal sepsis.

Methods: Case control study. Thirty infants born < or =32 weeks of gestation who developed late-onset sepsis were matched with 30 controls for gestational and postnatal age but remained sepsis free.