RESUMEN
In 2008, Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated the first nationwide survey, Korea Community Health Survey (KCHS), to provide data that could be used to plan, implement, monitor, and evaluate community health promotion and disease prevention programs. This community-based cross-sectional survey has been conducted by 253 community health centers, 35 community universities, and 1500 interviewers. The KCHS standardized questionnaire was developed jointly by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff, a working group of health indicators standardization subcommittee, and 16 metropolitan cities and provinces with 253 regional sites. The questionnaire covers a variety of topics related to health behaviors and prevention, which is used to assess the prevalence of personal health practices and behaviors related to the leading causes of disease, including smoking, alcohol use, drinking and driving, high blood pressure control, physical activity, weight control, quality of life (European Quality of Life-5 Dimensions, European Quality of Life-Visual Analogue Scale, Korean Instrumental Activities of Daily Living ), medical service, accident, injury, etc. The KCHS was administered by trained interviewers, and the quality control of the KCHS was improved by the introduction of a computer-assisted personal interview in 2010. The KCHS data allow a direct comparison of the differences of health issues among provinces. Furthermore, the provinces can use these data for their own cost-effective health interventions to improve health promotion and disease prevention. For users and researchers throughout the world, microdata (in the form of SAS files) and analytic guidelines can be downloaded from the KCHS website (http://KCHS.cdc.go.kr/) in Korean.
RESUMEN
OBJECTIVES: The Korea HIV/AIDS cohort was constructed with 18 hospitals that care for HIV-infected individuals in 2006. We compared the epidemiological and immunological characteristics of the cohort registrants with those of the HIVinfected population at the time of HIV diagnosis. METHODS: This study was conducted on 5717 people living with HIV/AIDS from 1985 to 2009, of which 789 individuals registered with the Korea HIV/AIDS cohort study. Individuals who had data from initial CD4+ T-cell counts measured within 6 months following HIV diagnosis were selected as study participants to predict the status of disease progression at the time of HIV diagnosis. A total of 2886 patients (50%) were selected from people living with HIV/AIDS, of whom 424 individuals (54%) were cohort registrants. The χ(2) test and Wilcoxon rank sum test were used for analysis. RESULTS: The distributions of age, marital status, diagnosed regions, reason for HIV testing, and screening site were similar between the HIV-infected population and the cohort registrants. In 1985-2004, the male ratio for the cohort registrants (94.3%) was significantly higher than that measured for the HIV-infected population (89.5%) (p = 0.0339). With regard to transmission route, homosexual contact of cohort registrants (46.6%) was higher than that of the HIV-infected population (40.1%) (p = 0.022) in 2005-2009. No statistical difference in CD4+ T-cell counts at the time of HIV diagnosis was found between the HIVinfected population and cohort registrants (p = 0.2195). CONCLUSION: The Korea HIV/AIDS cohort registrants represent the HIV-infected population, and the data collected from this cohort could be used as a foundation for national statistics.
