Critical Illness-Related Corticosteroid Insufficiency (CIRCI) is a condition still not completely understood. Although the current guidelines suggest the administration of corticosteroids only in septic patients who do not respond to the initial fluid resuscitation, it is not clear how it works and the signaling pathways that may affect its efficacy. Therefore, we made the hypothesis that corticosteroids therapeutic action may be related not only to cortisol levels, but also to the degree of glucocorticoids receptors (GR) expression. We included in this study 181 patients presented to the emergency department with the diagnosis of community pneumonia. Blood samples were collected at the admission and outcomes were evaluated during hospital stay and after 30 days. Cytokines were measured by Multiplex method, and glucocorticoid receptors α and β were measured in leukocytes homogenates by ELISA. Data are presented here as mean±SEM. Patients’ ages vary from 18.2 to 100.0 yo (average = 61.7±1.5). From the 181 patients, 96 were also septic and 40 had septic shock. Mortality was 17.7% (32 patients). Seventeen of these patients were chronic corticoid users and were evaluated separately. The main discriminators between survivors and non survivors were SOFA (2.9±0.2 vs 4.8±0.4, respectively, p<0.05) and total cortisol levels (18.5±2.1 vs 39.7±8.2, respectively, p<0.05). There was no difference in GR α or β expression between survivors and non survivors. Previous corticosteroid use also did not affect the levels of GRs expression, suggesting that these receptors are not subjected to feedback regulation.In addition none of the inflammatory markers measured at admission (proadrenomedulin, procalcitonin, C-reactive protein or cytokines) were able to distinguish the patients who would survive. We showed that cortisol levels are a good predictor of outcome in patients with community pneumonia and GR expression did not affect this outcome