Résumé
Objective: According to the thinking of research on quality control of traditional Chinese medicine based on “components reflect activity, activity points to efficacy”, the active ingredients obtained through network pharmacology screening were used as evaluation indicators to conduct a re-evaluation study on Liuwei Dihuang series preparations (LDSP). Methods: The network pharmacology technology was used to screen out LDSP, such as pills (big honey pills and concentrated pills), capsules (capsules and soft capsules), granules and oral liquids for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, hypertension and nephrotic syndrome of the common core active ingredients, and the amount of 13 active ingredients (quercetin, kaempferol, β-sitosterol, alisol B, alisol B23-acetate, taxifolin, hydroxygenkwanin, stigmasterol, cerevisterol, hederagenin, catechin, diosgenin and ethyl linolenate) with higher degrees was used as an index of investigation, the HPLC method was used to simultaneously measure the wavelength by switching, the determination was performed on Waters 2695 Supersil C18 (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) column with mobile phase consisted of methanol-0.08% phosphoric acid (gradient elution), volume flow rate was 1.0 mL/min, column temperature was 30 ℃, sample size was 10 μL, detection wavelength: first measurement was at full wavelength 200—400 nm, then maximum absorption was switched to detect wavelength according to the reference wavelength; The principal components analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) method were used to comprehensively evaluate and compare the quality differences of LDSP. Results: Under the same crude drug amount, the content of ingredients in LDSP was significantly different (P < 0.05), and some ingredients were missing in some preparations. Quercetin and catechin were not detected in soft capsules, β-sitosterol were detected only in big honey pills and granules. In the correlation analysis results, the similarity between LDSP was 0.170—0.897, and most of them were concentrated in 0.500—0.600. Big honey pills had the highest similarity with granules, concentrated pills and capsules, soft capsules and the oral solution showed a very significant correlation (P < 0.01), and was significantly related to big honey pills and granules (P < 0.05); The PCA and CA results of LDSP were classified into two categories, big honey pills and granules were classified into one category, and concentrated pills, capsules, soft capsules, and oral liquids were classified into one category. Conclusion: There are certain inherent quality differences in LDSP, which reveals that the phenomenon of completely consistent functional indications in the instructions of LDSP may not be reasonable.