NPPB and Sepsis: Among forty patients with sepsis and septic shock, Mclean et al. reported that BNP did not predict in-hospital mortality (odds ratio 1.0, 95%CI 0.99 - 1.0).(48) Other authors have also corroborated these findings, including in subsets of severe sepsis and septic shock.(74,82,92,93) These discrepant results may be partly due to the heterogeneity of sepsis, differences in timing of BNP measurement and types of assays used, small sample sizes and lack of controls for septic cardiomyopathy.(33,51,55) The optimal timing for measurement of BNP still remains to be ascertained.