Objective To investigate the clinical efficacy of hydrocortisone sodium succinate for treatment of septic shock patients and their prognoses. Methods A prospective case control study was conducted. 49 patients with septic shock in the Department of Emergency of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University were enrolled from January 2010 to January 2012,and the patients were sequentially divided into two groups,the treatment group(24 cases)and the control group(25 cases),by the difference in odd or even number. All patients in the two groups accepted the conventional treatment. The treatment group additionally received hydrocortisone sodium succinate injection 200 mg,once a day for 5 days. The levels of serum procalcitonin(PCT),C-reactive protein(CRP)were measured in all the patients before treatment and 24 hours,72 hours and 7 days after treatment. The mortalities were compared in 14 days between the two groups. Results The levels of PCT,CRP before and 24 hours after treatment were not statistically significant different from those of pre-treatment in two groups(all P>0.05). PCT and CRP were decreased at 72 hours and 7 days after treatment in the two groups,and on the 7th day the decline was more significant, and compared with the control group,the levels of PCT and CRP in treatment group were reduced more markedly at 72 hours and on the 7th day〔PCT(μg/L):72 hours 9.73±2.10 vs. 12.36±2.56,7 days 5.33±2.05 vs. 8.76±1.78;CRP(μg/L):72 hours 69.12±13.61 vs. 109.68±16.16,7 days 20.16±9.64 vs. 42.32±13.16,all P<0.05〕. But the mortality in 14 days was not statistically significant different between control group and treatment group(52.0%vs. 45.8%,P>0.05). Conclusion The treatment with hydrocortisone sodium succinate can reduce the inflammation of patients with septic shock,thus it has clinical value in the improvement of the disease situation.

Deciphering the metabolites of multiple components in herbal medicine has far-reaching significance for revealing pharmacodynamic ingredients.However,most chemical components of herbal medicine are secondary metabolites with low content whose in vivo metabolites are close to trace amounts,making it difficult to achieve comprehensive detection and identification.In this paper,an efficient strategy was proposed:herb-derived metabolites were predicted according to the structural characteristics and metabolic reactions of chemical constituents in Corydalis Rhizoma and chemical structure screening tables for metabolites were conducted.The fragmentation patterns were summarized from represen-tative standards combining with specific cleavage behaviors to deduce structures of metabolites.Ion abundance plays an important role in compound identification,and high ion abundance can improve identification accuracy.The types of metabolites in different biological samples were very similar,but their ion abundance might be different.Therefore,for trace metabolites in biological samples,we used the following two methods to process:metabolites of high dose herbal extract were analyzed to char-acterize those of clinical dose herbal extracts in the same biological samples;cross-mapping of different biological samples was applied to identify trace metabolites based on the fact that a metabolite has different ion abundance in different biological samples.Compared with not using this strategy,44 more metabolites of clinical dose herbal extract were detected.This study improved the depth,breadth,and accuracy of current methods for herb-derived metabolites characterization.