Application Frequency Research on Insomnia Correlated Treatment of Chinese Herbs Volume 10 - Issue 5

Yuan Sheng Liao*, Wei Wu Cai, Rui Ling Yang, Li Li Gao and Cheng Han Wu

• Department of Neurology, Clinical College of Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Fuzhou, China

Received: October 26, 2018;   Published: November 08, 2018

*Corresponding author: Yuan-Sheng Liao, Department of Neurology, Clinical College of Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Fuzhou, China

DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2018.10.002016

Abstract PDF

Objective: To study common Chinese herbs related to treatment of insomnia and their efficacy classification, providing references for their applications in treating insomnia.

Methods: By using information quantitative statistics method，8176778 literatures in CNKI China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database (CAJD)，Medical and Health Science and Technology Database were retrieved from 1996 to 2016.Full-text retrieval was performed by taking insomnia as “key word”. Totally 500 commonly used herbs with higher application frequency were retrieved as “key word”twice. Their application frequencies were statistically calculated. Then they were classified and analyzed by effectiveness in Chinese Materia Medica according to statistical results.

Results: Herbs for insomnia related treatment with higher application frequency were sequenced from high to low as licorice root(56183 times)， Chinese Angelica(54817)， Astragalus Atractylodes(45964), Salvia Miltiorrhiza(45959), Radix Bupleuri(44034)， Radix Paeoniae alba(39525), Astragalus membranaceus(39370)， Tuckahoe(37319)， pinellia(36268)，Dangshen(35292)，and so on.Recipes consisted of them were Suanzao Ren Decoction，Jiaotai Pill，Guipi Decoction and so on. According to effectiveness in Chinese Materia Medica, Chinese herbs with higher application frequency after comprehensive analysis were deficiency supplementing herbs，heat clearing herbs, activating blood circulation and removing blood stasis herbs qi regulating herbs， sedative herbs， and so on.

Conclusion: Deficiency supplementing herbs， heat clearing herbs, activating blood circulation and removing blood stasis herbs,qi regulating herbs， sedative herbs were commonly used Chinese herbs for treatment of insomnia.

Keywords: Insomnia; Chinese Herbal Treatment; Correlation; Information Quantitative Statistics

Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder, is a very common complaint of patients in various clinical departments, belongs to the category of “insomnia” in traditional Chinese medicine, Huangdi’s Classic known as “insomnia”, “cannot sleep”, “cannot lie down”, for a variety of reasons lead to insomnia caused by distracted sleep disorders. Chinese medicine is currently one of the most commonly used methods to treat the disease [1-3]. In order to objectively evaluate the commonly used Chinese medicines and their categories in the treatment of insomnia, this study used quantitative statistics to analyze the frequency of modern application of Chinese medicines related to insomnia and classified them according to the efficacy of Chinese Materia Medica. The results are reported below.

Data Source

With insomnia and 500 kinds of commonly used Chinese medicines as keywords, 8176778 articles were accurately retrieved from China How Net, China Academic Journal Network Publishing General Library and Medical and Health Science and Technology Database from 1996 to 2016. The retrieval methods are as follows: firstly, insomnia is used as the search term, and then 500 kinds of commonly used Chinese medicines are used as the search term for the second time. At the same time, the documents detected in the two searches are analyzed according to the following criteria, and the number of articles that meet the inclusion criteria are recorded, counted and sorted respectively.

Literature Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Inclusion criteria: literature on clinical (clinical research, clinical trials, clinical observations, clinical reports, clinical experience, etc.) and experimental (pharmacodynamic experiments, pharmacokinetic experiments, etc.); exclusion criteria: items, indexes and review of analytical literature.

Statistical Ranking Method

The number of articles in each Chinese medicine which were retrieved twice and met the inclusion criteria was recorded before the name of the Chinese medicine (one paragraph for each drug name, the number of articles recorded was based on 5 digits, and those Less than 5 digits make up 5 figures with 0 before figures), such as “06710 magnet”. Automatic ranking of paragraphs according to numbers in Word documents.

Classification Study

After searching, 500 kinds of traditional Chinese medicines were arranged in descending order. Only the first 200 kinds were classified according to the efficacy of Chinese Materia Medica. The total frequency and average frequency of the first and second classifications were listed respectively.

Frequency of application of Chinese medicines for insomnia (Table 1). The first 50 medicines included Suanzaoren Decoction (Suanzaoren, Ligusticum chuanxiong, Anemarrhenae, Poria cocos, Licorice), Guipi Decoction (Atractylodes macrocephala, Ginseng, Astragalus, Angelica sinensis, Licorice, Fuling, Polygala, Suanzaoren, Muxiang, Longan, Ginger, Dazao), Jiaotai pill (Coptis chinensis, Cinnamomum cassia) Commonly used prescriptions for insomnia.

Table 1: Table of application frequency of insomnia related Chinese Medicine.

The top 200 kinds of Chinese medicine related to insomnia were classified according to the results of Chinese Materia Medica (Table 2). According to the first-class efficacy classification, the top five frequencies were Tonic medicines (623628), Antipyretic (295220), Huoxue Huayu (271535), Relieving drug (152639) and Liqi (139183). According to the first-class efficacy classification, the average frequency of the top five were tonifying deficiency (16411), promoting blood circulation and removing blood stasis (14291), regulating qi (13918), calming the mind (13203), and Wenli (12810). According to the classification of secondary efficacy, the top five frequencies were Reinforcing Qi (280733 times), reinforcing blood (150614 times), activating blood circulation and regulating menstruation (149009 times), regulating qi (139183 times) and dissipating wind-heat (1111443 times). According to the second-level classification, the average frequency of the top five were Reinforcing Qi (25521 times), reinforcing blood (25102 times), activating blood circulation and regulating menstruation (24835 times), clearing away heat and drying dampness (18118 times) and astringent intestines to stop diarrhea (15877 times).

Table 2: Efficacy classification of insomnia related Chinese medicine application frequency.

Insomnia is a common clinical disease and frequently-occurring disease, but the causes of insomnia are complex, on the one hand, with its own individual psychological factors, physiological factors and genetic factors; on the other hand, with external factors such as environmental factors, physical diseases, mental illness, drug use or abstinence related. The pathophysiological mechanism is unclear, which is related to abnormalities of neurotransmitters, hormones, cytokines and circadian rhythms in the brain. Therefore, there is still a lack of truly safe and effective treatment drugs and methods. Oral sedative and hypnotic drugs such as diazepam are the most common and common treatment for insomnia [4]. However, insomniacs love and hate them because of their dependence, tolerance and addiction, residual sedation during the day and rebound after stopping the drugs. Hong Biqi and other [5- 13] reviewed the efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine in the treatment of insomnia.

In order to further understand the classification and application of Chinese medicines related to insomnia, this study used different statistical methods to analyze the first 200 kinds of Chinese medicines according to the efficacy classification of TCM. Firstly, the total frequencies of the first and second classifications of Chinese herbal medicines were counted. The results showed that there was a great correlation between the ranking results and the number of different kinds of Chinese herbal medicines. For example, according to the first-class efficacy classification, the top five frequently used tonifying deficiency, clearing away heat, promoting blood circulation and removing stasis, resolving exterior and regulating qi drugs, the number of medicines were 38, 28, 19, 12, 10 respectively, and the frequency ranking results were consistent with the number of classified species. In order to reflect the classification of Chinese medicines related to insomnia more accurately, the average frequency of the first and second classifications were calculated respectively. The results showed that although the correlation between the number of Chinese medicines and the number of species of Chinese medicines was significantly reduced, some categories with higher frequency were found to be related to some of them, such as warming, cooling and phlegm. The frequency of Pinellia ternata is high, and the frequency of water swelling is mainly related to the frequency of Poria cocos. Although the above classification methods have some limitations, but also to a certain extent reflects the application of different categories of traditional Chinese medicine.

It needs to be noted that the statistical results of this time are based on the full-text retrieval of the relevant database, cannot analyze the original text of the relevant literature, so inevitably there will be statistical incompleteness, and there will also be a certain drug is not a treatment for insomnia, but due to appear in the literature was statistical phenomenon. Therefore, the results of this study only reflect to some extent the objective situation of traditional Chinese medicine in treating insomnia. In summary, quantitative analysis of information found that the frequency of insomnia-related traditional Chinese medicine was higher than that of licorice, Angelica sinensis, Atractylodes macrocephala, Salvia miltiorrhiza, Bupleurum root, paeony root, Astragalus membranaceus, Poria cocos, Pinellia ternate and Codonopsis pilosula. According to the efficacy classification of TCM, the most frequently used drugs were tonic, heat-clearing, blood-activating and stasis-removing, Qi-Regulating and tranquilizing drugs. The results of this study reflect to some extent the current clinical application of insomnia-related Chinese medicine, which can be used as a reference for the future use of Chinese medicine in the treatment of insomnia.

The study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of the Fujian Province(2016J01563), the Youth scientific research project of fujian health and family planning commission(2016-1-80).

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