The criteria employed for Korean Behcet's disease (BD) from January 1990 to December 2000 have been investigated, and the diagnostic validity for those criteria was determined. For the generation of a modified set of preliminary criteria from the International Study Group (ISG) criteria, the diagnostic values for individual feature of BD were calculated. The criteria by the Behcet's Disease Research Committee of Japan appeared to be widely employed with the ISG criteria. However, because the ISG criteria revealed a relatively valid outcome in Korea, the application of this criteria will be needed for the universal unification until the criteria with better performance comes out. On the other hand, the modified set of preliminary criteria that consisted of the clinical items with better results seemed to improve some pitfalls of the ISG criteria. Although that criteria showed better performance than the preexisting criteria, it should be necessary to validate its effectiveness in other areas.
Behcet Syndrome/classification ; Behcet Syndrome/diagnosis* ; Behcet Syndrome/epidemiology ; Bibliometrics ; Data Collection ; Databases, Factual ; Human ; Korea/epidemiology ; Likelihood Functions ; Prevalence ; Sensitivity and Specificity

Behcet's syndrome is being detected increasingly in Korea. To collect and document information concern- ing the clinical picture as it is records of patients seen in our clinic in the period between November 1983 and March 1986 were used as source material. In summary, it was found that (1) the total number of patients who had two majors symptoms at least were 410, including 170 men and 240 women; (2) Patients in their thirties were the most common, the mean age being 34.6 years; (3) according to Lehner's classification, the order of frequency of the different types was mucocutaneous (52%), ocular (33), arthritic (14%) and neurologic (1%) and according to Shimizu's classification, it was incomplete (39%), suspected (37%), and complete (24%); (4) oral ulcers, which had observed in 407 patients were the most frequent major symptom, followed by genital ulcers in 338 patients.
Adolescent ; Adult ; Age Factors ; Aged ; Behcet Syndrome/classification/diagnosis/*epidemiology ; Child ; Epidemiologic Methods ; Female ; Human ; Korea ; Male ; Middle Age ; Seasons ; Sex Factors