The Establishment of K-CaP (the Multicenter Korean Prostate Cancer Database)

PURPOSE: The purpose of this article was to announce the establishment of the multicenter Korean Prostate Cancer Database (K-CaP) and to provide urologists with details about K-CaP's methodology. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The initial participating K-CaP institutions include five medical centers in Korea. First, we registered prostate cancer patients who underwent radical prostatectomy as the basic background data. K-CaP is poised to combine these initial observational longitudinal studies with those of other eligible institutions as the database grows. All current prostate cancer patients in Korea are able to be registered into the Web-based database system and thereby have a role in several observational studies. The structure of the database for K-CaP was developed by matching it with the respective data from different studies. The operability of the K-CaP database system was verified by using the existing databases from three participating institutions. RESULTS: The analysis of clinicopathologic characteristics of patients with the use of the Web-based database was successfully conducted. We confirmed the accurate operation of the Web-based database system without any difficulties. CONCLUSIONS: We are announcing the establishment of K-CaP the first database of comprehensive observational longitudinal studies about prostate cancer in Korea. The database will be successfully maintained by sufficiently and continuously updating all patient data covering several treatments. Complete statistical results for registered prostate cancer patients are forthcoming for the basic background data to establish the database. Even though much trial and error are expected during the development process, we expect that K-CaP will eventually become one of the most powerful longitudinal observation databases.