Distribution of Traditional Chinese Medicine Syndromes and Syndrome Elements of Chronic Heart Failure Based on Network Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played a significant role in the prevention and treatment of chronic heart failure (CHF). To study TCM diagnosis of CHF, a total of 278 Chinese clinical research articles on the study of CHF syndromes in recent 40 years retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Embase, CNKI, Wanfang Data, CqVIP, and SinoMed. According to cumulative frequency analysis, network analysis, and hierarchical cluster analysis, the study found the distribution of CHF syndromes was syndrome of qi deficiency with blood stasis, syndrome of qi and yin deficiency, syndrome of yang deficiency with water flooding, syndrome of heart blood stasis obstruction, syndrome of turbid phlegm, and syndrome of collapse due to primordial yang deficiency. The syndrome elements on location of illness were heart, kidney, lung, and spleen. The syndrome elements on nature of illness were qi deficiency, blood stasis, yang deficiency, yin deficiency, water retention, and turbid phlegm. These findings can provide reference to the research on diagnosis and treatment of CHF, and contribute to the study on syndrome standardization and objective research of TCM diagnosis.