Kyung Hee University · Medicine
Professor Ki-Ho Park's research lab specializes in infectious diseases, with a primary focus on bone and prosthetic implant infections, including vertebral osteomyelitis (HVO) and spinal implant infections. The lab investigates pathogen-specific treatment strategies, antibiotic duration, and diagnostic tools such as differential time to positivity for catheter-related infections. A significant emphasis is placed on understanding the virulence and clinical outcomes of community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) and rare infections like syphilis with bone involvement. The lab also explores the safety and efficacy of surgical interventions, such as spinal instrumentation, in the context of persistent or recurrent infections.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Antibiotic therapy of prolonged duration (≥8 weeks) should be given to patients with HVO at high risk of recurrence. For low-risk patients, a shorter duration (6-8 weeks) of pathogen-directed antibiotic therapy may be sufficient.
Bone involvement is an unusual manifestation of secondary syphilis, but little information is available in the English-language literature. We carried out a systematic review of the English-language literature from 1964 to 2013, describing cases of secondary syphilis with bone involvement. We also describe a case of secondary syphilis with multiple osteolytic lesions, mimicking metastatic cancer or myeloma, which was included in an analysis of 37 eligible cases of secondary syphilis with bone in
After controlling for confounding factors, ST72-SCCmecIV was independently associated with lower mortality compared with ST5-SCCmecII, suggesting this CA-MRSA strain to be of lower virulence. The lack of virulence genes, including staphylococcal superantigen genes, may play a role in the lower virulence of this strain.
A differential time to positivity (DTP) of ≥ 120 min is useful for diagnosing catheter-related bacteremia, but data on diagnosing catheter-related candidemia (CRC) in this way are limited. We wished to evaluate the usefulness of the DTP for diagnosing CRC. All adult patients who had the same Candida species isolated from blood cultures drawn simultaneously from a central venous catheter (CVC) and a peripheral vein were included at a tertiary care hospital over an 18-month period. A total of 105
Spinal instrumentation in patients with HVO may be safe with pathogen-directed prolonged antibiotic therapy and should not be abandoned or delayed solely because of the risk of recurrence.
Multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria have become a severe problem for public health. Developing new antibiotics for MDR bacteria is difficult, from inception to the clinically approved stage. Here, we have used a new approach, modification of an antibiotic, ciprofloxacin (CFX), with triphenylphosphonium (TPP, PPh<sub>3</sub>) moiety via ester- (CFX-ester-PPh<sub>3</sub>) and amide-coupling (CFX-amide-PPh<sub>3</sub>) to target bacterial membranes. In this study, we have evaluated the antibacterial
In patients with CRSAB, bacteremia persisted in 21% of cases despite catheter removal and initiation of antimicrobial therapy. Methicillin resistance, renal failure, and non-catheter prosthetic devices were independent risk factors for persistent CRSAB, which was associated with a higher rate of complications.
Despite the improved outcomes in patients with hematological malignancies, infections caused by multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) pose a new threat to these patients. We retrospectively reviewed the patients with hematological cancer and bacterial bloodstream infections (BSIs) at a tertiary hospital between 2003 and 2022 to assess the impact of MDROs on outcomes. Among 328 BSIs, 81 (24.7%) were caused by MDROs. MDRO rates increased from 10.3% (2003-2007) to 39.7% (2018-2022) (P < 0.001). The
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