Prevention and Treatment Regularity of Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on Pathogenesis of Depression / 中国实验方剂学杂志

ABSTRACT

Depression is a serious threat to human health. There are grave difficulties in its prevention and treatment. At present, Western medicine has not yet found a definitive and effective therapy for depression. By virtue of its holistic view, rich clinical practice plus less side effects, traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) may have potential advantages in the prevention and treatment of depression. Single-herbal TCM or TCM compound is one of the main methods for TCM to treat depression. The chemical composition of natural medicine is quite complicated, moreover, the composition of TCM compound is more complicated. Therefore, this paper focuses on the role of single-herbal TCM in preventing and treating depression. Many researchers have discovered more TCM with the effect in preventing depression from historical literatures or clinical experience of different doctors. There are four main causes in the pathogenesis of depression: the first is the abnormal expression of monoamine neurotransmitters and their receptors, the second is the depression of nerve cells and relevant signaling pathways, the third is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis that continuously intensifies to cause dysfunction and depression, and the fourth is the abnormal secretion of cytokines. Which mechanism does TCM work through? The meridian tropism theory is an important guiding principle in the clinical use of TCM. Is there a certain relationship between the different meridian tropisms and different pharmacological mechanisms of TCM? To solve these two basic problems, this paper systematically summarizes all the literatures on the mechanism of TCM in the prevention and treatment of depression, and uses the chi-square test to analyze the relationship between the TCM and the four mechanisms of action. This exploration may contribute to further clinical and experimental research on the prevention and treatment of depression with TCM.