Burden of illness, quality of life, and healthcare utilization among patients with herpes zoster in South Korea: a prospective clinical–epidemiological study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To assess the herpes zoster (HZ) disease burden, including the severity and duration of HZ-associated pain, its impact on quality of life (QoL), and healthcare resource utilization (HCRU) in a South Korean clinical setting. METHODS: Patients aged ≥50 years were followed prospectively for ≤6 months. Based on the duration of their episode at enrollment, cases were classified as incident (<7 days) or prevalent (≥7 days). HZ pain and discomfort were measured with the HZ Severity of Illness (HZ-SOI) severity-by-duration composite score. RESULTS: One hundred fifty-one patients (69.5% prevalent cases) were enrolled. Prodrome pain was experienced by 68.2% of patients, of whom 95.1% experienced moderate-to-severe pain; post-herpetic neuralgia was experienced by 38.4%. Prevalent disease, higher acute pain, and older age were significant predictors of greater HZ-SOI, while use of antivirals was associated with decreased HZ-SOI. HZ-associated pain was associated with reduced QoL and affected all daily living activities (particularly mood, life enjoyment, general activities, and sleep), resulting in significant HCRU, including primary care doctor, specialist, or physiotherapist consultations, hospitalizations, and emergency department visits. CONCLUSION: Severe morbidity, impaired QoL, and significant HCRU are associated with HZ in South Korea, especially in older patients, supporting the need for early intervention and preventive strategies to reduce the HZ-associated disease burden.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".