Abstract
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ZHENG is the basic concept of TCM theory. The effectiveness of TCM treatment depends on the accuracy of ZHENG differentiation. ZHENG differentiation, using the “four diagnostic methods,” has the drawbacks of subjectivity and variability. Following development of omics technologies, which study the functional activities of human body from a system-wide perspective, it has been more and more applied in study of objectivity differentiating TCM ZHENG and understanding its biological mechanisms. This paper reviewed the literatures of clinical TCM ZHENG differentiation researches, underlying omics technologies, and indicated the increased trends of related articles with four kinds of omics technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, and the correlations between ZHENG differentiation and findings in omics studies. Moreover, the paper summarized the typical omics application in common studied diseases and TCM ZHENGs and discussed the main problems and countermeasure of ZHENG differentiation researches. The work here may provide a reference for further research of TCM ZHENG differentiation using omics technologies.
Highlights
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a healthcare system with rich experience over 3000 years of continuous practice and refinement [1]
These studies provided an evidence for TCM therapy and indicated that omics technologies are proper tools to investigate the regulatory mechanisms of ZHENG-based TCM treatment
Considering the complexity of TCM ZHENG, it is advised that modern TCM ZHENG differentiation research should start with the typical ZHENG that diagnostic evidence of ZHENG such as symptoms and signs is very obvious [3]
Summary
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a healthcare system with rich experience over 3000 years of continuous practice and refinement [1]. ZHENG differentiation, which is used to guide TCM treatment by acupuncture, herbal formulae, and so on, is one of the most important procedures in the practice of TCM. Transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, have recently been widely used in the TCM ZHENG differentiation studies [8–11], with the rapid growth of large-scale detection technologies [12]. With the help of computational approaches, omics technologies focus on understanding functional activities from a systemswide perspective [13]. It is similar with the characteristics of TCM ZHENG, which pays much attention to integrity and dynamics. Different omics data helps to explore the variation of DNA, mRNA, protein, and metabolite in human body, and computational approaches help to explore molecular functional networks [14]. After 767 unrelated studies were filtered out, 140 articles were found from 2003 to October 31, 2012
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