Preventive treatment of traditional Chinese medicine as antistress and antiaging strategy.

Premedical intervention before diseases is one of the principal practices in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for tackling health problems and diseases. This paper explains the preventive treatment principle in TCM regarding the subhealth condition following stress-induced pathophysiological situations, mainly oxidative and glycation stresses, in the framework of metabonomics and cell biology. Scientific interpretations for various preventive treatments in TCM present the idea that disease prevention should surpass medical intervention in humans. Antistress biology is proposed for the first time as a preclinical practice or strategy for antiaging.