'Relation, association, attribution ...' – the multiple faces of death in critical care medicine

Mortality is one of the most important quality markers in critical care, and there have been many epidemiological studies trying to identify risk factors to better understand the mechanisms leading to death in this complex disease. One of the major problems is that there are multiple factors contributing to fatal outcome of septic patients, and it is difficult to distinguish between those that are independent from the acute disease (comorbidities and 'risk factors') and those that are directly involved in the pathomechanisms of sepsis, thus leading to the 'sepsis-attributable' mortality. In this short commentary, some examples of different approaches of how to analyze data on mortality are presented.