In contrast to Western medicine, which typically prescribes one medicine to treat a specific disease, traditional East Asian medicine uses any one of a large number of different prescriptions (mixtures of medicinal herbs), according to the patient's characteristics. Although this can be considered an advantage, the lack of a universal prescription for a specific disease is considered a drawback of traditional East Asian medicine. The establishment of universally applicable prescriptions for specific diseases is therefore required. As a basic first step in this process, this study aimed to select prescriptions used in the treatment of stroke and, through the analysis of medicinal herb combination frequencies, select a high-frequency medicinal herb combination group for further experimental and clinical research. As a result, we selected some candidates of a medicinal herb combination and 13 candidates of a medicinal herb for the treatment of stroke.

Twenty-three candidates were selected for cognitive-enhancing herbal formulae and their main constituents. For 14 herbal formulae among the 23 candidates, on average 5.6 published research papers per herbal formula describing cognitive-enhancing effects were found. In addition, some published papers were identified for 5 main constituents most frequently used to make up the 23 candidates.