• Health Policy and Management
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.541-564
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• 2011

This study aimed to investigate health outcome of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients such as mortality and length of stay in hospital and to identify factors associated with the health outcome according to the comorbidity index. Nation-wide representative samples of 3,748 adult inpatients aged between 20-85 years with acute myocardial infarction were derived from the Korea National Hospital Discharge Injury Survey, 2005-2008. Comorbidity index was measured using the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI). The data were analyzed using t-test, ANOVA, multiple regression, logistic regression analysis in order to investigate the effect of comorbidity on health outcome. According to the study results, the factors associated with length of hospital stay of acute myocardial infarction patients were gender, insurance type, residential area scale, admission route, PCI perform, CABG perform, and CCI. The factors associated with mortality of acute myocardial infarction patients were age, admission route, PCI perform, and CCI. CCI with a higher length of hospital stay and mortality also increased significantly. This study demonstrated comorbidity risk adjustment for health outcome and presented important data for health care policy. In the future study, more detailed and adequate comorbidity measurement tool should be developed, so patients' severity can be adjusted accurately.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.527-540
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• 2011

Some patients tend to visit tertiary hospitals instead of non-tertiary hospitals for minor illnesses, which is a chronic problem within the Korean health care delivery system. In order to reduce the number of patients with minor severity diseases unnecessarily utilizing the tertiary medical services in Korea, the Ministry of Health and Welfare raised the outpatient co-insurance rate for the tertiary hospitals in July, 2009. Another increase in the prescription drug co-insurance rate by the general and tertiary hospitals is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011. An increase in copayments may discourage the utilization rate of medical services among the underprivileged or patients who require complicated procedures. This study aims to analyze the diabetic patients' utilization rates of tertiary hospitals according to the Comorbidity score. Diabetic patients' data was gathered from the Health Insurance Claims Records in the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service between 2007-2009. Comorbidity scores are measured by the Charlson Comorbidity Index and the Elixhauser Index. Chi-square and logistic regressions were performed to compare the utilization rates of both insulin-dependents (n=94,026) and non-insulin-dependents (n=1,424,736) in tertiary hospitals. The higher Comorbidity outcomes in the insulin-dependent diabetic patients who didn't visit tertiary hospitals compared to those who did, was expected. However, after adjusting the gender, age, location, first visits and complications, the groups that scored >=1 on the comorbidity scale utilized the tertiary hospitals more than the O score group. Non-insulin-diabetic patients with higher Comorbidity scores visited tertiary hospitals more than patients who received lower grades. This study found that patients suffering from severe diabetes tend to frequently visit the tertiary hospitals in Korea. This result implied that it is important for Korea to improve the quality of its primary health care as well as to consider a co-insurance rate increase.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.2672-2679
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• 2012

The study was done to provide basic data of medical quality evaluation after developing the comorbidity disease mortality measurement modeled on the severity-adjustment method of AMI. This study analyzed 699,701 cases of Hospital Discharge Injury Data of 2005 and 2008, provided by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We used logistic regression to compare the risk-adjustment model of the Charlson Comorbidity Index with the predictability and compatibility of our severity score model that is newly developed for calibration. The models severity method included age, sex, hospitalization path, PCI presence, CABG, and 12 variables of the comorbidity disease. Predictability of the newly developed severity models, which has statistical C level of 0.796(95%CI=0.771-0.821) is higher than Charlson Comorbidity Index. This proves that there are differences of mortality, prevalence rate by method of mortality model calibration. In the future, this study outcome should be utilized more to achieve an improvement of medical quality evaluation, and also models will be developed that are considered for clinical significance and statistical compatibility.

• Korean Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.74-82
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• 2016

Objectives : Suicide attempters have impaired decision making and are at high risk of reattempt. Therefore it is important to refer them to psychiatric treatment. Especially, People with medical comorbidity are at higher risk of suicidal attempt and mortality. The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of suicidal attempters and to analyze the influence of the medical comorbidity on decision to receive psychiatric treatment after visit to an emergency department. Methods : One hundred and thirty two patients, who visited the emergency room of a general hospital in Gyeonggi-do between January, 2012 and December, 2012 were enrolled as the subjects of this study. After reviewing each subject's medical records retrospectively, demographic and clinical factors were analyzed. Results : Regardless of the engagement type, either via admission or outpatient clinic, the determinant factors of psychiatric treatment engagement were psychiatric diagnosis, employment status, previous psychiatric treatment history, and previous attempt history. Comparison of severity of medical comorbidity(Charlson Comorbidity Index) showed that suicide attempters who received psychiatric treatment via admission or refused the treatment tended to have higher level of medical comorbidity than who received psychiatric treatment via outpatient department. Conclusions : Our findings showed that medical comorbidity of suicide attempters affected the decision to accept psychiatric treatment. All psychiatrists should evaluate the presence and the severity of medical comorbidity of the suicide attempters and consider implementing more intervention for the medically ill attempters who are willing to discharge against advice.

• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.91-106
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• 2024

The mechanisms of the chronic pain and depression comorbidity have gained significant attention in recent years. The complement system, widely involved in central nervous system diseases and mediating non-specific immune mechanisms in the body, remains incompletely understood in its involvement in the comorbidity mechanisms of chronic pain and depression. This review aims to consolidate the findings from recent studies on the complement system in chronic pain and depression, proposing that it may serve as a promising shared therapeutic target for both conditions. Complement proteins C1q, C3, C5, as well as their cleavage products C3a and C5a, along with the associated receptors C3aR, CR3, and C5aR, are believed to have significant implications in the comorbid mechanism. The primary potential mechanisms encompass the involvement of the complement cascade C1q/C3-CR3 in the activation of microglia and synaptic pruning in the amygdala and hippocampus, the role of complement cascade C3/C3a-C3aR in the interaction between astrocytes and microglia, leading to synaptic pruning, and the C3a-C3aR axis and C5a-C5aR axis to trigger inflammation within the central nervous system. We focus on studies on the role of the complement system in the comorbid mechanisms of chronic pain and depression.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.174-180
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• 2018

Objective: Clostridium difficile Infection (CDI) is one of the common nosocomial infections. As elderly population increases, the proper treatment has been emphasized. We investigated the risk factors associated with CDI unimprovement in elderly patients. Furthermore, we performed drug use evaluation of old CDI patients and oldest-old CDI patients. Methods: It was a retrospective study using electronic medical record at Kangbuk Samsung Medical Center (KBSMC) from January 2016 to December 2017. Seventy three patients aged 65 years or older, diagnosed with CDI by Clostridium difficile Toxin B Gene [Xpert] were screened and they were assessed for risk factors regarding unimprovement status. We also evaluated drug use evaluation in old patients ($65{\leq}age$<80) and oldest-old patients ($80{\leq}age$) by assessing the use of initial therapy, severity, dose, route, treatment course, days of use, total days of use and treatment outcome of initial therapy. Results: Out of 73 patients aged over 65 years, four patients were excluded because they did not receive any treatment. There were 31 improved patients and 38 unimproved patients after initial therapy. We were able to find out patients with surgical comorbidity or endocrine comorbidity (especially, diabetes mellitus) had 2.885 more risk of becoming unimproved than those patients without surgical comorbidity or endocrine comorbidity. Drug use evaluation for CDI was generally fair, but vancomycin as initial therapy is more recommended than metronidazole. Conclusion: Although age, antibiotics exposure, use of antacids are all important risk factors for CDI, our result did not show statistical significance for these risk factors. However, the study is meaningful because the number of elderly population keeps increasing and recently updated guideline suggests the use of vancomycin as drug of choice for CDI.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.13-18
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• 2019

Comorbidity isthe simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient. As part of a larger research study, the aims of this study were to explore comorbid conditions in intensive care unit (ICU) patients and to compare the comorbidity across different demographic groups, and to determine what comorbid health problems coexisted in the patients with hospital-acquired pressure injury (HAPI). The average number of comorbid conditions was 6.4 with range from 0-20 in the ICU patients. African American patients had significantly more comorbid health problems than other race/ethnicity groups. Asian and Hispanic female patients showed higher comorbidity than male patients across age. The patients with HAPIs had significantly more comorbid health problems than the patients without HAPIs -- the average numbers were almost two-fold. We found comorbid health problems that existed with HAPI in ICU patients. 'Other diseases of lung' and 'Disorders of fluid, electrolyte, and acid-base balance' were most frequently coexisting health problems in the ICU patients with HAPI. Exploratory plots are helpful to discover patterns or hypotheses relevant to clinical management in critical care. Inclusion of patients' comorbid health problems to ICU HAPI risk assessment may be helpful. Identification of patients at a high risk for the development of HAPI and the early preventative interventions can help reduce length of stay as well as costly complications.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.22-32
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• 2016

As the number of aged population rapidly goes up, the cases of stroke and the related medical expenses continuously increase. The purpose of this study is to investigate the mortality of stroke patients based on CCI(Charlson Comorbidity Index) by utilizing the Korea National Hospital Discharge Injury Survey, analyzing the factors associated with the mortality of stroke patients. We analyzed 21,494 cases which are classified as the death of strokes aged over 20 years by using the Korea National Hospital Discharge Injury Survey between the year 2005 and 2010. In order to find out the mortality based on CCI and status of comorbidity, we used the technical statistics. We performed a logistic regression analysis to examine the reasons for the mortality of the strokes. We found that the independent variables for the influence of the mortality of strokes include age, type of insurance, residence urban size, size of hospital beds, the location of hospital, admission route, physical therapy, brain surgery, type of stroke, and CCI. This indicates that the effective monitoring on the age, types of stroke, comorbidity is needed. In addition to this, more medical support toward medicaid patients are needed, too. We believe that these results will be used positively for the evaluation of the stroke patients, providing the basic materials for the further research on the establishment of the health-related policy.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.827-831
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• 2012

To determine the relationship between comorbidity and outcome after radical cystectomy in Chinese patients by using the Adult Comorbidity Evaluation (ACE)-27 index. Two-hundred-and-forty-six patients treated with radical cystectomy at the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Hunan Province, China between 2000 and 2010 were retrospectively analyzed. Medical records were reviewed for age, gender, delayed time of radical cystectomy, urinary diversion type, pelvic lymphadenectomy status, TNM stage, and pathological grade. Comorbidity information was assessed by the ACE-27 index. The outcome measurement was overall survival. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analyses were used to determine the association between comorbidity and outcome. The study population consisted of 215 (87.40%) males and 31 (12.60%) females with a mean age of $62{\pm}11$ years. Median duration of follow-up was $47{\pm}31$ months. A total of 151 (61.38%) patents died during follow-up. Of those, 118 (47.97%) had at least one comorbidity. According to the ACE-27 scores, 128 (52.03%) patients had no comorbidity, 79 (32.11%) had mild, 33 (13.41%) had moderate, and 6 (2.45%) had severe comorbidities. Multivariate analysis indicated that moderate (p=0.002) and severe (p<0.001) comorbidity was significantly associated with decreased overall survival. In addition, age ${\geq}70$ years (p=0.002), delayed time of radical cystectomy >12 weeks (p=0.044), pelvic lymphadenectomy status (p=0.014), and TNM stage >T3 (p<0.001) were determined to be independent risk factors of overall survival. Increasing severity of comorbidity statistically correlated with decreased overall survival after radical cystectomy.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.113-122
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• 2017

The purpose of the study was to investigate the patient, disease and hospital characteristics which affect treatment result and early complication for inpatients with psychiatric comorbidity. We analyzed data on 19,806 patients of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2012 to 2014, Korea National Hospital discharge in-depth data. Frequency, chi-square and logistic regression analysis was performed, using STATA 12.0. According to logistic regression analysis, gender(Odds ratio(OR)=0.776, 95% confidence interval(CI)=0.686-0.878), insurance type(OR=0.853, CI=0.731-0.995), operation(OR=0.424, CI=0.350-0.513), disposition(OR= 39.307, CI=34.394-44.923), beds(300-499, OR=0.470, CI=0.377-0.585; 500-999, OR=0.462, CI=0.395-0.541; 1000 over, OR=0.598, CI=0.480-0.745) were significant predictors of treatment result. And insurance type(OR=1.527, CI=1.241-1.879), CCI(3 over, OR=1.865, CI=1.534-2.266), operation(OR=5.399, CI=4.562-6.389), disposition(OR=1.279, CI=1.013-1.614), district(Metropolitan city, OR=0.519, CI=0.407-0.661; Non-metropolitan OR=0.469, CI=0.383-0.574), beds(500-999, OR=2.799, CI=1.986-3.944; 1000 over, OR=2.109, CI=1.429-3.113) were significant predictors of early complication. This research would be used as a basic data of high quality of medical care and efficient resource utilization in order to detect and minimize the negative medical treatment results of inpatients with psychiatric comorbidity.