[The MEDAN database: patients with abdominal septic shock].
Septic shock still has an unacceptable high mortality rate. To lowering this high mortality rate in the long run, we built a database that is unique in its data amount. Until now we have transferred 282 handwritten patient records into our database. Data were collected retrospectively from 1997 to 2001, based on voluntary cooperation of 62 hospitals. With the preprocessed data of our database we give mainly an epidemiologic overview and make first statistical evaluations. Thereby we noticed that some diagnoses and operations appear significantly higher for deceased patients than for survivors. At the end we discuss the future potential of the database.