Abstract

In 1968 The Korean Society of Pathology (authored by Chae Koo Lee, Sang Kook Lee. Sang In Kim and Je G. Chi et al) presented the first nationwide data on cancer prevalence among Koreans, based on 22,208 biopsy and autospy cases during a 10 year period of 1958 to 1967. Since that time there has been a multitude of factors that might have influenced on the cancer prevalence among Koreans. In this study, an analysis was made on 7,363 consecutive cases of primary malignant tumors, all diagnosed microscopically at the Department of Pathology, College of Medicine. Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, during a 10 year period from January 1968 to December 1977. The great majority of the cases of this study were specimens from in-patients and out-patients of Seoul National University Hospital, and some were from outside hospitals sent for the confirmative diagnosis. Hematological diagnoses were made by staffs of Department of Clinical Pathology Seoul National University Hospital. Metastatic tumors were excluded from the statistics. The description of tumor of each case was made in a punch card. These cards were classified according to the World Health Organization code numbers of diseases and other items including those of each calender year, sex and the age distributions. And the results were tabulated. The following analyses were male. 1. The total number of malignant tumors included in this study was 7,363. There were 3,662 cases of male (49.7%) and 3,663 cases of female (49.7％). 2. The mean age of the patients with cancer was 46.6 years; 47.1 years in male and 45.6 years in female. 3. The frequency ranks of malignant tumors in male, female and both sexes are listed in Table 1. Among all malignant tumors in both sexes together, the relative frequency in percentage is cancer of the stomach (16.65％), uterine cervix cancer (15.08％), leukemia (6.51％), liver cancer (5.62％), breast cancer (5.53％), skin cancer (4.29％), thyroid cancer (4.13％), malignant lymphoma (4.03％), rectal cancer (3.92%) and larynx cancer (3.72%) in decreasing order of frequency. 4. Among all malignant tumors in male the relative frequency in percentage is stomach cancer (22.23%), liver cancer (8.98％), leukemia (8.36%), laryngeal cancer (6.19%), skin cancer (5.65%), malignant lymphoma (5.19%), lung cancer (4.4％), urinary bladder cancer (4.23%) and bone cancer (3.25%) in decrasing order of frequency. 5. Among all malignant tumors in female the relative frequency in percentage is uterine cervix cancer (39.3%), stomach cancer (11.0%), breast cancer (10.89%), thyroid cancer (6. 67％), leukemia (4.72%), rectal cancer (3.41%), malignant lymphoma (2.89%), skin cancer (2.87%), ovary cancer (2.6%) and uterine body cancer (2.46%) in decreasing order of frequency. 6. The age distribution of the malignant tumors shows the highest frequency in the sixth decade in male and the fifth decade in female. 7. Generally, the annual identification of total malignant tumors shows a tendency of gradual increase since the first year of the study. An increasing trend appears definite in breast cancer, thyriod cancer, liver cancer particularly in female, and a decreasing trend is suggestive in cancer of uterine cervix and malignant lymphoma.