Publications by authors named "Sun Kyung Baek"

Purpose: Identifying the palliative care needs of patients with advanced cancer is important for maintaining quality of life and timely transition to palliative care. We aimed to validate the Korean Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral for Care (K-SPARC) in such patients and establish its psychometric properties, including reliability, validity, and responsiveness to change.

Materials And Methods: We used the forward-back translated version of SPARC, which was verified through a pilot study, to assess the palliative care needs of patients with advanced cancer.

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Backgruound: Adrenocortical carcinomas (ACCs) are rare tumors with aggressive but varied prognosis. Stage, Grade, Resection status, Age, Symptoms (S-GRAS) score, based on clinical and pathological factors, was found to best stratify the prognosis of European ACC patients. This study assessed the prognostic performance of modified S-GRAS (mS-GRAS) scores including modified grade (mG) by integrating mitotic counts into the Ki67 index (original grade), in Korean ACC patients.

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Rationale: Acquired hemophilia A (AHA) is a rare autoimmune disease caused by an antibody that inhibits coagulation factor VIII activity. More than half of patients with AHA cannot identify underlying disorders. The remaining patients are associated with malignancies, autoimmune diseases, skin diseases, infections, and medications.

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Despite the improved outcomes in patients with hematological malignancies, infections caused by multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) pose a new threat to these patients. We retrospectively reviewed the patients with hematological cancer and bacterial bloodstream infections (BSIs) at a tertiary hospital between 2003 and 2022 to assess the impact of MDROs on outcomes. Among 328 BSIs, 81 (24.

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Advancements in the treatment and management of patients with cancer have extended their survival period. To honor such patients' desire to live in their own homes, home-based supportive care programs have become an important medical practice. This study aims to investigate the effects of a multidimensional and integrated home-based supportive care program on patients with advanced cancer.

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Purpose: This study aimed to investigate clinical practices and factors related to the outcomes of T-DM1 use in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer (mBC).

Methods: We included patients with HER2-positive mBC who received T-DM1 as a palliative therapy between August 2017 and December 2018. The safety and outcomes of T-DM1, including overall response rate (ORR), progression-free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS), were evaluated.

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Objectives: This study systematically reviewed the literature on the effect of home-based supportive care (HbSC) programmes on the quality of life (QoL) of patients with advanced cancer.

Methods: The research question 'Do home-based supportive care programmes for patients with advanced cancer improve their QoL?' was addressed. After registering the plan with PROSPERO (CRD42022341237), literature published from 1 January 1990 to 30 May 2023 was searched on PubMed, Embase, Cochrane database, CINAHL and Web of Science, and reviewed for inclusion based on predefined criteria.

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Article Synopsis
  • Electronic medical records (EMRs) are crucial for gathering real-world data (RWD) to assess the effectiveness and safety of cancer treatments, with this study focusing on drugs like ramucirumab plus paclitaxel and trastuzumab emtansine in South Korea.
  • A systematic data collection procedure was established, which included evaluating the reliability of both investigators and the data collected, resulting in high reliability scores and a significant reduction in missing data.
  • The findings highlight the importance of structured data collection in real-world studies, ultimately creating a reliable framework for evaluating cancer drug efficacy and safety.
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Population-based analyses of the treatment outcomes of colorectal cancer (CRC) in Asian countries are limited. Therefore, we conducted a nationwide study to assess the relationship between the timing and duration of adjuvant chemotherapy (AC) and survival in patients with CRC in South Korea. Data on AC from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service Database (HIRA) were analyzed, and the survival of patients who underwent curative-intent surgical resection for CRC between 2011 and 2014 was investigated.

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Pembrolizumab is an immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) against the programmed death-1 receptor. Herein, we introduce a rare adverse effect during using pembrolizumab. We present the case of an 80-year-old man with biopsy-proven unresectable double primary squamous cell carcinoma and large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the lung.

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Background: Chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) is one of the most important issues associated with chemotherapy. The additional or synergistic effect of acupuncture on CINV remains controversial.

Methods: Patients were randomized into either the group that received standard antiemetics with acupuncture (Arm A) or standard antiemetics only (Arm C).

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Purpose: The treatment of male breast cancer (MBC) has been extrapolated from female breast cancer (FBC) because of its rarity despite their different clinicopathologic characteristics. We aimed to investigate the distribution of intrinsic subtypes based on immunohistochemistry, their clinical impact, and treatment pattern in clinical practice through a multicenter study in Korea.

Materials And Methods: We retrospectively analyzed clinical data of 248 MBC patients from 18 institutions across the country from January 1995 to July 2016.

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Pulmonary manifestations of benign metastasizing leiomyoma (BML) usually include multiple well-defined, round, bilateral nodules. Low-grade endometrial stromal sarcoma (LG-ESS) is a rare uterine tumor. A 70-year-old woman visited the clinic complaining of acute cough and dyspnea in April 2017.

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Purpose: Evaluation of symptoms and signs for the management of neuropathic cancer pain (NCP) is challenging. This study aimed to identify clinical predictors of NCP and symptoms and signs most relevant of those in Korean patients.

Methods: This nationwide, descriptive, cross-sectional, multicenter, observational study included 2,003 cancer patients aged ≥20 years who reported a visual analog scale (VAS) score ≥1 for pain and provided informed consent for participation.

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Purpose: The "Act on Hospice and Palliative Care and Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment for Patients at the End-of-Life" was enacted on February 3, 2016 and went into effect on February 4, 2018 in Korea. This study reviewed the first year of determination to life-sustaining treatment (LST) through data analysis of the National Agency for Management of Life-Sustaining Treatment.

Materials And Methods: The National Agency for Management of LST provided data between February 4, 2018 and January 31, 2019 anonymously from 33,549 patients.

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Purpose: In Korea, the "Act on Hospice and Palliative Care and Decisions on Life-sustaining Treatment for Patients at the End of Life" was enacted on February 4, 2018. This study was conducted to analyze the current state of life-sustaining treatment decisions based on National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) data after the law came into force.

Materials And Methods: The data of 173,028 cancer deaths were extracted from NHIS qualification data between November 2015 and January 2019.

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Purpose: The main purpose of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Decisions Act recently enacted in Korea is to respect the patient's self-determination. We aimed to investigate the current status and features of patient self-determination after implementation of the law.

Materials And Methods: Between February 2018 and January 2019, 54,635 cancer deaths were identified from the National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) database.

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Purpose: Six forms relating to decisions on life-sustaining treatment (LST) for patients at the end-of-life (EOL) in hospital are required by the "Act on Decision of LST for Patients at the EOL." We investigated the preparation and creation status of these documents from the database of the National Agency for Management of LST.

Materials And Methods: We analyzed the contents and details of each document necessary for decisions on LST, and the creation status of forms.

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Background/aims: This nationwide study was undertaken to determine differences in clinicopathologic characteristics and survival of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) according to age using big data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service (NHIS).

Methods: The NHIS data including quality assessment of CRC by the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service in Korea between 2011 and 2014 were analyzed. Based on age, patients were divided into three groups: not-old patients (< 65), young-old patients (65 to 74 years old) and old-old patients (≥ 75 years old).

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Background: Lenvatinib, a novel multi-target tyrosine kinase inhibitor, has been approved for treating differentiated thyroid cancer. Herein, we describe a rare case of acute pancreatitis that developed during lenvatinib treatment in a 65-year-old man with recurrent thyroid cancer.

Case Presentation: The patient was admitted to our department following a complaint of acute-onset epigastric pain and indigestion.

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Purpose: This study aimed to validate the Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral to Care (SPARC) as an effective tool for screening palliative care needs among Korean cancer patients.

Materials And Methods: The English version of the SPARC was translated by four Korean oncologists and reconciled by a Korean language specialist and a medical oncologist fluent in English. After the first version of the Korean SPARC (K-SPARC) was developed, back-translation into English was performed by a professional translator and bilingual oncologist.

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The effect of adjuvant chemotherapy (AC) for resected gastric cancer is well established; however, delays in treatment and its impact on clinical outcomes have not yet been determined. The current study analyzed the survival rates based on time interval (TI) between surgery and AC administration to evaluate a potential association between the two variables. Patients diagnosed with stage II-III gastric adenocarcinoma between 2009 and 2016 at the Kyung Hee University Hospital were included.

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Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as pembrolizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody against programmed death-1, elicit antitumor activity in various types of cancers, including lung cancer. However, pembrolizumab has been reported to cause diverse immune-related adverse events associated with T-cell activation.

Case Presentation: We present the case of a 61-year-old man with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who was administered pembrolizumab as first-line treatment.

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Background: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) harboring 11q23 translocations is classified as therapy-related AML in patients who have undergone prior treatment with cytotoxic agents. There have been only a few reports of AML that subsequently developed during imatinib mesylate (IM) treatment for gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs).

Case Summary: A 63-year-old woman was diagnosed with a hepatic GIST recurrence in April 2012; she was administered IM 400 mg/d.

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Background: Cancer-related fatigue (CRF) is a common symptom and has a negative impact on prognosis in cancer patients. CRF could be improved by Korean red ginseng (KRG).

Patients And Methods: For this randomised and double-blinded trial, colorectal cancer patients who received mFOLFOX-6 were randomly assigned to either KRG 2000 mg/day (n = 219) or placebo (n = 219) for 16 weeks.

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