Chinese Herbal Medicine for Migraine: An Application of Text Mining

Abstract

Migraine is one of the most chronic disableheadache diseases, and it effects 5% to 10% of adults. Patientscould not work effectively, or even keep a high quality of life.As a complex neuro-vascular disease, the pathology ofmigraine is still not fully understood. Many medical methodsare applied to release symptoms or prophylaxis of migraine,such as behavior therapy, pyschotherapy, acupuncture,massage, and drug therapy. In China, Chinese herbalmedicines (CHMs) are also used to treat migraine. Throughthe long history, and also in modern era, various CHMs areprescribed in different formulae. In clinical practice, aproportion of patients in China will not only take biomedicaldrugs, but also receive CHMs therapy or combinationaltheatment. This combination will broaden new field in themanagement of migraine. To explore some answer to whichCHMs are most prescibed in formulaes and basic traits ofthese CHMs, as well as biomedical drugs in combination withthese CHMs, we designed a study based on text miningtechnology for these three questions. In this study, we built adataset from the information downloaded in Sinomed database.With our novel text mining method, CHMs in this dataset werecounted, and some fundamental parameters of each CHM,such as cold/heat property, flavours, and channel tropism werealso recorded. Besides, biomedical drugs prescribed togetherwith CHM were also involved in statistic. Results showed thatChuan Xiong, Tian Ma, Dan Shen, Dang Gui and Xi Xin arethe top 5 CHMs used to cure migraine. Among all these CHMs,warm CHMs were most frequently used in the treatment ofmigraine, pungent was the most frenquent flavour, and liver,heart are the top 2 channels, both these two visceras wererelated to human psychoactivity in TCM theory, and furtherregulate the disease acitivity of migraine. Cinnarizine,flunarizine, nimodipine, and nitroglycerin were drugs mostcombined with CHM to cure migraine. These results indicatedthat text mining could be an effective method in exploring therules of CHMs prescription and the combination ofbiomedicine and CHMs in treatment of migraine