Research Article Traditional Chinese Medicine Zheng in the Era of Evidence-Based Medicine: A Literature Analysis

Copyright © 2012 Miao Jiang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Zheng, which is also called a syndrome or pattern, is the basic unit and a key concept of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theory. Zheng can be considered a further stratification of patients when it is integrated with biomedical diagnoses in clinical practice to achieve higher efficacies. In an era of evidence-based medicine, confronted with the vast and increasing volume of TCM data, there is an urgent need to explore these resources effectively using techniques of knowledge discovery in databases. The application of effective data mining in the analysis of multiple extensively integrated databases can supply new information about TCM Zheng research. In this paper, we screened the published literature on TCM Zheng-related studies in the SinoMed and PubMed databases with a novel data mining approach to obtain an overview of the Zheng research landscape in the hope of contributing to a better understanding of TCM Zheng in the era of evidence-based medicine. In our results, contrast was found in Zheng in different studies, and several determinants of Zheng were identified. The data described in this paper can be used t