The Prevalence of Infection and Sepsis Associated Dysphagia in Hospitalised Patients: A Retrospective Cross-sectional Study.

The study relied on ICD-10 clinical coding data, which is not perfectly accurate and may have missed cases of subtle dysphagia or miscoded oesophageal dysphagia as oropharyngeal. The retrospective design prevents establishing causality; it is unclear whether the infection/sepsis caused the dysphagia or if pre-existing subclinical dysphagia was unmasked. No baseline instrumental swallowing assessments were performed at admission, so the timing of onset and recovery dynamics could not be determined. The study did not follow up patients post-discharge, so the persistence of dysphagia after leaving hospital is unknown. Residual confounding remains a possibility, as unmeasured factors (e.g., severity of illness, medication effects) may have influenced the results.

The authors declared no competing interests.

Do not assume that infection or sepsis directly causes dysphagia in all cases. The study identifies an association, but because it was retrospective and lacked baseline swallowing assessments, it cannot rule out that the dysphagia was pre-existing but subclinical and simply became apparent during the stress of illness.