Prescription regularity of traditional Chinese medicine for treating alcoholic liver disease based on traditional Chinese medicine inheritance support system / 中草药

ABSTRACT

Objective: To summarize the prescription rules of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for treating alcoholic liver disease (ALD) based on TCM inheritance support system (V2.50). Methods: The literatures about TCM prescriptions for treating ALD were collected from CNKI, Wanfang database, and VIP database. The TCM inheritance platform system was used to analyze the prescription rules of TCM in the treatment of alcoholic liver disease. Results: Statistics showed that the majority of prescriptions were used to treat alcoholic fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, and alcoholic cirrhosis. Through "frequency statistics" analysis, 107 prescriptions were found involving 149 flavors of TCM, with a cumulative frequency of 1 195 times. Twenty-three Chinese medicines with a frequency of ≥ 15 times were used, and the cumulative frequency was 737 times (62%). The most frequently used medicines were blood-activating and stasis-removing drugs, water-diffusing and damp-permeating drugs, tonics, heat-clearing drugs, antialcoholic poisons and qi-regulating drugs. The commonly used doses of Salvia miltiorrhiza, Poria cocos, Bupleurum chinense, Glycyrrhiza uralensis, Atractylodes macrocephala, Alismatis Rhizoma, and Curcumae Radix in the top 10 medicines ranked in the frequency of medication accorded with the prescribed doses in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China (2015 edition), while Crataegi Fructus, Artemisiae Scopariae Herba, and Puerariae Lobatae Radix exceeded the prescribed doses. In the frequency analysis of drug pairs, the combination of S.miltiorrhiza and B. chinense was the most widely used. According to the association rules of drug combination, the correlation between Curcumae Radix and S. miltiorrhiza was the strongest, that was, the probability of S. miltiorrhiza appearing with the emergence of Curcumae Radix was 88%. From the network display chart, it was indicated that S. miltiorrhiza and P. cocos were the main herbs for treatment. Through unsupervised entropy hierarchical clustering algorithm, 14 core combinations for new clustering were extracted, and seven new prescriptions can be obtained by further clustering. Conclusion: The basic principles of TCM treatment of ALD include promoting blood circulation and removing blood stasis, removing dampness, tonifying, detoxifying alcohol, and promoting qi, and with "protecting spleen and stomach function" as its purpose, which accords with the theoretical basis of traditional Chinese medicine in treating alcoholic liver disease. Core combinations and new prescriptions provide references for clinical drug use and new drug research and development, but new prescriptions must be further evaluated with the combination of traditional Chinese medicine theory and clinical practice.