Reporter
Medical Insights Korea
Andrew Cho reports on urology in South Korea for Medical Insights Korea, covering urological practice, treatment evidence, and the research behind it.
FAQ · Prostate Cancer
In Korean national data it changes what treatment you get. Men tested beforehand were far more likely to have surgery; men who were not were far more likely to be put on hormone therapy.
Andrew Cho5 min read
News · Overactive Bladder
95 institutions, three months of treatment, and a set of thresholds rather than an average. 2.3 percent rose by 20 mmHg or more — which is the figure a hypertensive patient should be given.
Andrew Cho6 min read
News · Urinary Tract Infection
Conventional culture found an organism in 16.4 percent of recurrent cases. Sequencing found one in 82.4 percent — and the organisms it found were not the same ones.
Andrew Cho6 min read
News · Prostate
In 1,445,144 patients, 92.4 percent were on treatment inside two months. Watchful waiting is a guideline option for mild symptoms and it is barely visible in the national data.
Andrew Cho5 min read
News · Prostate Cancer
50.6 percent high-risk across a decade, with the low-risk share falling from 11.4 to 7.6 percent. 55.4 percent of high-risk cases came from rural areas against 47.7 percent from urban ones.
Andrew Cho6 min read
FAQ · Sexual Health
Korea switched syphilis from sentinel reporting to mandatory reporting on 1 January 2024 and widened the criteria at the same time. The rise was already happening, and the 2024 number still cannot be compared with the 2019 one.
Andrew Cho5 min read
News · Prostate
Prostate volume rises from 24.7 to 33.7 grams across three decades while peak flow falls from 20 to 13.8 mL/s. The sample is large, and it is not a random sample of Korean men.
Andrew Cho6 min read
News · Overactive Bladder
Mean symptom score fell from 6.9 to 4.6 and every bladder-diary measure improved. The number worth carrying is the other one: 43.4 percent reached the threshold that counts as a real change.
Andrew Cho6 min read
FAQ · Sexual Health
Two thirds of these panels come back positive for something. Korea's own guidelines say the three organisms found most often are usually not sexually transmitted infections and usually need no treatment.
Andrew Cho5 min read
News · Urinary Tract Infection
National surveillance of 885 patients puts numbers on a drug most people are still prescribed first. Fosfomycin was 94.9 percent effective. Ciprofloxacin was closer to a coin toss.
Andrew Cho6 min read
FAQ · Urinary Tract Infection
Common enough that the most frequently prescribed option now fails in roughly two cases out of five in Korea. Which antibiotic you were given matters more than how long you take it.
Andrew Cho4 min read
News · Sexual Health
52,009 cases across 250 municipalities in one year, with hotspots in metropolitan and south-eastern areas. The strongest municipal correlate was the share of households with one person in them.
Andrew Cho7 min read
FAQ · Sexual Health
The test finds the virus. It does not date it, and it cannot say who it came from. That is not reassurance — it is the actual limit of what the result contains.
Andrew Cho7 min read
News · Sexual Health
Six of the model's seven authors work for the vaccine manufacturer. The professional society that has revised its guidance four times in a decade does not.
Andrew Cho7 min read
FAQ · Sexual Health
Korea's national programme vaccinates girls only. A Korean cost-effectiveness model puts including boys below the country's own threshold, and the gynaecological oncology society now addresses vaccinating middle-aged men.
Andrew Cho8 min read
News · Sexual Health
Two national claims analyses of the same decade show cost climbing almost three times faster than caseload, alongside a treatment mix that diverged sharply by sex.
Andrew Cho7 min read
FAQ · Sexual Health
Treatment removes the wart, not the virus. What nobody can tell you honestly is how often they return, because the trials that would answer that were never done well.
Andrew Cho8 min read
FAQ · Prostate
A Korean study measured something most trials do not: how often men under monitoring were newly started on antidepressants, compared with men who had been treated.
Andrew Cho5 min read
FAQ · Prostate
In 27,075 Korean cases, more than half were high-risk at diagnosis. The proportion found early has been falling, not rising.
Andrew Cho5 min read
FAQ · Prostate
Androgen deprivation is still the commonest drug treatment for prostate cancer in Korea. Two years of it measurably changes bone, and a national cohort found a signal in the brain.
Andrew Cho5 min read
FAQ · Prostate
Radiotherapy spares continence where surgery does not. Its own cost falls somewhere else, and one part of it does not recover with time.
Andrew Cho5 min read
FAQ · Prostate
Much of the risk is measurable before the operation, and one of the strongest predictors is a length on the MRI that was taken anyway.
Andrew Cho5 min read
FAQ · Kidney Stones
Korean laboratories analysed 33,078 stones in five and a half years. The composition changes what prevention is even possible.
Andrew Cho4 min read
FAQ · Prostate
The risk is real, it is concentrated on one specific day, and that is what makes it manageable rather than alarming.
Andrew Cho4 min read
News · Kidney Stones
Allopurinol lowers urate by making less of it; benzbromarone lowers it by pushing more into the urine. In 61,300 matched Korean patients, the second route carried a 56 percent higher rate of urinary stones.
Andrew Cho7 min read
FAQ · Kidney Stones
The drug most often prescribed for this failed its placebo-controlled trial. What replaces it is a test, not another tablet.
Andrew Cho5 min read
FAQ · Kidney Stones
Korean national data put a number on it, and the number is high enough to change what should happen after the first stone.
Andrew Cho4 min read
News · Kidney Stones
Two national cohort studies of the same decade agree on the lifetime risk and disagree on whether the disease is still spreading. The number that decides what happens after the pain stops is neither of those.
Andrew Cho7 min read
News · Kidney Stones
Shockwave lithotripsy is still the operation Korea performs most for urinary stones. The scan that finds them rose 394.8 percent — in a disease that recurs, in patients who are mostly of working age.
Andrew Cho7 min read
News · Prostate
This coverage has asked repeatedly what happens to the men Korea finds late. The answer, in national prescribing data, is androgen deprivation — and two studies now put numbers on what that costs.
Andrew Cho7 min read
News · Prostate
The country that became the world's reference case for finding cancer too early has the opposite problem in prostate cancer. This is what the published data shows, where it runs out, and what it never recorded at all.
Andrew Cho9 min read
News · Prostate
Three articles here have described what prostate surgery does to continence and none has described the alternative. Randomised patient-reported data and two Korean series fill the gap — and disagree about how much is happening, for a reason worth knowing.
Andrew Cho7 min read
FAQ · Prostate
Fifteen years of randomised follow-up found survival did not depend on the choice. What it depends on is which harms a man is willing to take, and — in Korean data — which hospital he attends.
Andrew Cho7 min read
FAQ · Prostate
The randomised evidence is now mature enough to give real numbers on both sides. Korea's own data suggests its question is not the one the trials were designed to answer.
Andrew Cho6 min read
News · Prostate
Pooled data on 12,620 men finds age, urethral length and existing urinary symptoms predict continence after robotic prostatectomy. All three are measurable at the clinic visit where the decision is made.
Andrew Cho6 min read
News · Prostate
A target trial emulation using national linkage data found four prostate cancer deaths in total between surgery and surveillance. The finding it could measure was psychological.
Andrew Cho6 min read
News · Prostate
In 27,075 biopsy-confirmed cases from 51 hospitals, 53.9 percent were high-risk at diagnosis and the low-risk share fell from 11.4 to 7.6 percent over a decade. Rural men fared worse than urban ones.
Andrew Cho6 min read