Evidence-Based ZHENG: A Traditional Chinese Medicine Syndrome 2013

ZHENG, also known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) syndrome or TCM pattern, is an integral and essential part of TCM theory. A TCM ZHENG, in essence, is a characteristic profile of all clinical manifestations that can be identified by a TCM practitioner. Clinical treatments of a patient rely on the successful differentiation of a specific ZHENG. Recently, technologies and methods of omics, bioinformatics, bionetwork, and data mining through a system biology approach were applied in ZHENG research, which have significantly facilitated the development of ZHENG theory. Following 2012 Evidence-Based ZHENG special issue, we have further grouped together 15 excellent papers on TCM ZHENG research and put them forward for publication in this special issue. Firstly, there are 2 research papers in this special issue which addressed the clinical trials based on TCM ZHENG classification and treatment. A paper has evaluated the adaptability of TCM ZHENG diagnosis and found that " Yang-Xu Zheng " of TCM is an early prognostic predictor for patients with severe sepsis and septic shock. Another paper, with a randomized, double-blind clinical study, has evaluated the efficacy of crest herbal toothpaste in " clearing internal heat. " Interestingly it has been instructed that the toothpaste (Crest Herbal Crystal) is efficacious through brushing with 1 g toothpaste for 2 minutes each time, 2 times per day in 4 weeks in the internal heat. In addition, the studies of the acupuncture, an efficient therapeutic method originated in ancient China, have also been systematically reviewed. In TCM, the clinical diagnosis of ZHENG relies on the gathering of clinical information through inspection, aus-cultation and olfaction, inquiry, and palpation. For ZHENG measurement of the inquiry, 2 research articles of this special issue presented the ZHENG diagnostic methods. A research article discussed the method of objective auscultation of TCM based on wavelet packet fractal dimension and support vector machine. Another paper has investigated ZHENG classification with missing feature values using local-validity approach. This is through the study of the value contributed by symptoms to syndrome diagnosis of chronic hepatitis B, that is, diagnosis weight, constructing symptom-syndrome scale of chronic hepatitis B, and realizing quantitative diagnosis from symptom to syndrome. Five research articles of this special issue presented the TCM ZHENG classification using profiles of genes, proteins, metabolites, and/or biomarkers. Therein, it has been identified as the relationship between EGF, TGFA, and EGFR gene polymorphisms and ZHENG in gastric cancer, and the curative effects …