Background
: Owing to a recent socioeconomical development, a variety of health-seeking behaviors to improve one's own health are in vogue. In this study we intended to search for the correlation between each health-seeking behavior and upper respiratory tract infection which primary care physi-cians are most commonly in contact with.

Methods : From March. 17, 1994 to April 16, 1994, we questiond 736 students of 3 universities in Seoul about their health-seeking behaviors and the duration of upper respiratory tract infection which they contracted from November 1993 to February 1994 via questionnaire and then analyzed 718 responses, excluding cases with insufficient answers.
Result: Singificantly more collegewomen(80%) than collegemen(68%) experienced URI symptoms for 4 months in winter. The collegewomen group who asserted alcohol abstinence and smoking cessation for health experienced URI symptoms less frequently than other groups. The collegewomen showed significant positive relations of URI with sportstime. However, the duration of URI symptoms in collegemne wast not related with sportstime. In view of the relation between smoking and URI sysmptoms, we found more incidence in smokers than non=smokers among collegemne. The survey of the reliance on the tonis or herb medicine revealed that 266(48.2%) collegemen and 75(45.2%) collegewomen were relying on tonics or herb medicine for health. But no significant correlation were found between tonics or herb medicine and the duration of URI symptoms, in collegemen or in collegewomen. Otherwise, there was no correlation between the duration of URI symptoms and heat-keeping diet, or drinking habits.

Conclusion : In this study we have a conclusion that primary care physicians should encourage people to abstain from smoking and to avoid excessive exercise in order to prevent URI infection Furthermore, it may be necessary that we should perform prospective study based on the widespread, epidemiological data about health-seeking behaviors in order to uncover the correlation between the illness and one's desirable health-seeking behaviors.