Background
: It is very important aspect in primary care to control life style factors related to diseases. But it seems that primary care doctors have difficulties to appraise biopsycosocially the patient's life style and apply the results into the the daily outpatient managements in Korea, where the medical surroundings confind the interview time with patient's life style easily, bio-psychosocially, and objectively, especially during managing in the office.
Method: From June to August in 1995, among the encounters of outpatient clinic of the de-partment of Family Medicine, Saint Mary Hospital, 203 subjects were recommended to check their life styles on checklists. This checklist is the one which Dr.Lee modified to be compatible with Korean culture out of Wilson's Fantastic life styles, which is consisted of 25 items each of that we allocated 0-4 points to. So total life style score of this checklist is 100. Among the subje-cts 22 subjects, sampled randomly, were retested 1 week after the 1st test for reliability test by phone interview. The patients who had been diagnosed as adult disease, were allocated into mor-bid group(77 subjects), and the others into healthy group(77 subjects). Cross sectional study was performed. And the data were analyzed through correlation analysis, student, t-test, and Chi-square test using MINITAB 7.1 package program.

Results : The checklist used in this study showed an acceptible correlation coefficient(r=0.879) on test-retest. The mean life style score was 65.7(SD 0.75, 41-87)in total group, 63.3(SD 10.37, 41-87)in morbid group, and 68.2(SD 8.48, 53-87)in healthy group. The mean score of morbid group was significantly lower than the one of healthy group(p=0.0016). Among the 25 total life style items, 10 items showed significantly lower scores in morbid group than in healthy group such as 'positive thinking(p=0.0002)', 'anxiety and worry(p=0.003).', 'anger(p=0.0006)', etc. When life style score was divided into 5 classes by 90% and 70% of sensitivity and specificity, odds ratio between excellent and dangerous groups was 3.56. The post-intervention reappraisal for knowing the short term effect, tried at 3 weeks after the pre-intervention test, showed a rise of mean life score by 4.1(p=0.026).

Conclusion : The checklist, used in this study is agreed as a useful method to assess and ap-praise patient's life style, acceptible in reliability and validity, adaptible in outpatient primary care medicine, and applicable in self-assessment by patients.