Anlong Xu on Zhengs (Patterns)

Anlong Xu on Zhengs (Patterns)

Zheng uses the Yin-Yang, exterior-interior, cold-heat, and deficiency-excess definitions to describe patients’ conditions, which are then managed by Zheng-specific recipes (Figure 1). Modern 'omics techniques combined with bioinformatics and bionetwork models through a systems biology approach have been applied to investigate the differences between Zhengs and to identify novel biomarkers. For instance, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients differentiated on the basis of “hot” and “cold” Zhengs have been shown to be associated with different underlying genomic and metabolomic profiles, with the RA hot group showing more apoptotic activity than the cold group (4). Additionally, Liet al. used a network-based computational model to understand Zheng in the context of the neuro-endocrine-immune network and found that cold and hot Zhengs were closely related to a metabolism-immune imbalance (5). Wang and colleagues investigated the urine metabolome of patients with jaundice syndrome and its two subtypes of Yang Huang (acute) and Yin Huang (chronic), and identified several biomarker metabolites (6). However, most of the current studies have relied on only one or two approaches for molecular profiling and have lacked an efficient method to integrate data obtained at different 'omiclevels. These studies also did not look at combining the analysis of molecular data with clinical variables, possibly missing an opportunity to generate more convincing conclusions. Considering the limitations of past studies, future efforts should integrate an analysis for all levels of 'omics (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, and proteomics) data from a large number of patient samples for different Zhengs and include an investigation of the prognostic and therapeutic utilities of the data as a whole. Moreover, combining these molecular data with patients’ clinical information could provide evidence-based theoretical interpretations for Zhengs and enable an assessment of Zheng-based therapeutic approaches.

The complete paper is available here.