The main purpose of this study is to investigate the region-specific cause of gallbladder stone incidence in Jeju Self-Governing Province, Korea.

Investigators performed the epidemiologic study to uncover the reason of relatively higher incidence of Gallbladder cancer in small isolated island, Jeju island, one of small province among 11 self governing area in South Korea. Tow studies, including descriptive epidemiology and analytic epidemiology using case-control study, some risk factors were obtained regarding Gallbladder cancer development in this area. Old age, female, and gallstone were potential risk factors and alcohol consumption was preventive factors. So authors decided to evaluate the relationship between alcohol and gallbladder stone in order to how much portion of causal relationship they have with gallbladder cancer. So this study was designed to investigate the relationship between gallbladder stone and alcohol consumption then performed clinical based case-control study with age-sex matching to each subjects.

Case group

Inclusion Criteria:

• Clinical diagnosis of gallstone disease after cholecystectomy.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Ambiguous diagnosis cases for gallbladder stone.
• Incomplete medical record.

Control group

Inclusion Criteria

• Healthy examinees in Health Promotion Center in same Institute
• Eligible cases of abdominal ultrasound(US) or computed tomography(CT)

Exclusion Criteria

• The case who was diagnosed as asymptomatic gallstone on abdominal US

Case group was enrolled from the patients who were diagnosed as gallbladder stone disease with definite clinical symptoms and underwent cholecystectomy in Cheju Halla General Hospital, Jeju, Korea during 3 years (2009-2012). And control group was determined as 1:1 age-sex matched subjects selected from the participants without GBS among Health Promotion Center in the same institute and periods.