No abstract

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and a major burden on the healthcare system worldwide. It has a severe impact on patients due to poor health-related quality of life (HRQL), dyspnea, and exertional intolerance. Our previous meta-analysis revealed that body acupuncture therapy had adjuvant benefits of improving HRQL in COPD patients undergoing optimal medical treatment. Previous studies indicated that treatment with combinations of acupoints was more effective than single acupoint treatment. The association rule analysis has been widely used to explore relationships in acupoint combination. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the potential core acupoint combination in COPD treatment by mining the association rules from the retrieved randomized control trials (RCTs) of the previous meta-analyses. This study was conducted based on Apriori algorithm-based association rule analysis, which is a popular data mining method available in software R. We extracted acupoints as binary data from the 12 included RCTs for analysis. There were 27 acupoints extracted from 12 RCTs. The top 10 frequently selected acupoints were BL12, BL13, BL20, BL23, BL43, CV17, EXB1, LU5, LU7, and ST36. We investigated 2444 association rules, and the results showed that {ST36, BL12} ≥ {CV17}, {ST36, BL12} ≥ {EXB1}, {CV17, BL12} ≥ {ST36}, and {EXB1, BL12} ≥ {ST36} were the most associated rules in the retrieved RCTs. The acupoint combinations of ST36, BL12, and CV17 and ST36, BL12, and EXB1 could be considered as the core of acupoint combination for further acupuncture treatment of COPD.

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the imbalance of yin and yang is one of the basic pathogeneses of a disease. Preponderance of yang leads to "heat" manifestations including thirst, dryness of the throat, dark scanty urine and constipation. Treatment of asthma in TCM is based on the differentiation of "heat" Zheng according to the manifestations. Some of the patients with allergic asthma also present typical "heat" manifestations. To investigate the essence of "heat" manifestation in asthma, we measured the serum level of eosinophil cationic protein (ECP) in asthmatic patients. ECP usually represents the activation of eosinophils which are the main effectors in late allergic reactions. Our results demonstrated that asthmatic patients with "heat" manifestations had higher serum ECP levels, compared to those without "heat" manifestations (34.3 +/- 4 microg/l versus 15.3 +/- 3 microg/l). However, total immunoglobulin B (IgE), and the eosinophil count in peripheral blood did not show any difference between the "heat" and "non-heat" groups. Therefore, we conclude that ECP in asthmatic patients plays an important role in the development of "heat" manifestations as diagnosed by TCM.