Analysis of Studies on Colorectal Cancers Published in Korean Medical Journals Between 1967 and 2004

Paik, Eunkyoung; Kim, Soonduck; Lee, Jesuk

Abstract

PURPOSE: The study analyzed and categorized the colorectal cancers related medical journals published in Korea by the name of the journal, research materials, study method, statistical method and by content of study for the quality improvement of colorectal cancers related studies.
METHODS
The authors reviewed a total of 567 colorectal cancer-related studies published in the Korean medical journals during the period 1967 and 2004 and kept in the National Assembly Library. The distribution of research materials, study method, statistical method and content of these studies were analyzed by the 5 year publication interval.
RESULTS
By study period, the number of published studies steeply increase during the period between 2000 and 2004. As the research materials, hospital patients(64.6%) and In-vitro(16.6%) were the most prevalently used research materials, but health adults were the lowest research materials by only taking up 0.4%. In study methods, patient follow up studies(28.7%) and human in vitro experimental(27.9%) were prevalent, and human in vitro experimental were relatively the most popular performed studies during the years of 1990-1994. As the statistical method, life table and survival analysis(27.0%) were the mostly performed methods, and the use of statistical method was applied in nearly all studies. The contents of the studies mainly focused on the patient prognostic estimations(27.6%) of therapeutic safety & efficacy(25.6%), but only the 4.1% of risk factors studies. Among the 109 studies which analyzed the survival term 78.9% of the studies mainly used the 5 year term in the analysis of survival rates.
CONCLUSION
The results of the study could be utilized as the basic data for the quality improvement of further colorectal cancers related studies.