Association learning of Chinese herbal medicines and disease treatment efficacy

Abstract

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) usually suffer from great pain. It is difficult to cure RA thoroughly. Among various treatment methods, the Chinese herbal medicine is attracting more and more attention. The aim of this study is to analyse the associations between the herbs and the effectively improved laboratory indexes used to evaluate the treatment efficacy. The data was collected from the First Hospital Affiliated to Anhui University of Chinese Medicine. The definition of effectively improved laboratory indexes was proposed. The association rules learning was applied to identify associations between the herbs and the effectively improved key laboratory indexes. Core herbs and their combination patterns were discovered from large-scale prescriptions. Our results were also validated by relevant traditional Chinese medicine theory and physicians' clinical experience, which indicated the applicability and reliability of our method in studying the effectiveness of herbal medicines.

Keywords:

• Rheumatoid arthritis
• association rules learning
• laboratory indexes
• Chinese herbal medicine
• TCM theory

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Editor, Associate Editor and reviewers for helpful comments and valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 71571176).