ANALYSIS OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE PRESCRIPTIONS FOR CEREBRAL STROKE-RELATED DISEASES

Abstract

Cerebral stroke, a type of cerebrovascular disease, has become the second leading cause of death globally. It is closely related to many diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, senile dementia, and so forth. As traditional Chinese medicine formulas are increasingly used to treat stroke and its associated diseases, people have begun to use machine learning methods to analyze Chinese medicine prescriptions and summarize their laws. In this study, we collected the data from classic Chinese formulations. Using the Jaccard similarity coefficient method, we calculated the similarity between different prescriptions. We then employed average linkage clustering, categorizing medicine prescriptions for chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease into 12 groups. Some of these included “Heart Failure and Warm Kidney Soup”, “Sinus Chamber Junction Syndrome, Quadruple One Depression, Yi Qi, Activating Blood and Feeding Heart Soup”, “Nerves One, Depression One, Tian Ma Hook and Vine Drink”, and “Bawei Antihypertensive Decoction, Anemia Decoction, Hypotension Decoction, Myocardial Live Drink”. We observed that similar prescriptions had more meaningful mutual references. Subsequently, a correlation algorithm was used to analyze the “indications” and “prescription composition”, revealing 11 effective correlation rules. Among these, palpitations were strongly correlated with Astragalus membranaceus, Angelica sinensis, and cassia twig; weakness with Salvia miltiorrhiza, A. membranaceus, and A. sinensis; headaches with Ligusticum wallichii; and vertigo with A. membranaceus. These findings provided a theoretical reference for using traditional Chinese medicine in treating cerebral stroke and associated illnesses.