Research Center for Traditional Chinese Medicine Complexity System, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 1200 Cailun Road, Pudong, Shanghai 201203, China.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2013;2013:989618. doi: 10.1155/2013/989618. Epub 2013 Jun 18.
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ZHENG is the basic concept of TCM theory. The effectiveness of TCM treatment depends on the accuracy of ZHENG differentiation. ZHENG differentiation, using the "four diagnostic methods," has the drawbacks of subjectivity and variability. Following development of omics technologies, which study the functional activities of human body from a system-wide perspective, it has been more and more applied in study of objectivity differentiating TCM ZHENG and understanding its biological mechanisms. This paper reviewed the literatures of clinical TCM ZHENG differentiation researches, underlying omics technologies, and indicated the increased trends of related articles with four kinds of omics technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, and the correlations between ZHENG differentiation and findings in omics studies. Moreover, the paper summarized the typical omics application in common studied diseases and TCM ZHENGs and discussed the main problems and countermeasure of ZHENG differentiation researches. The work here may provide a reference for further research of TCM ZHENG differentiation using omics technologies.
中医证是中医理论的基本概念。中医治疗的效果取决于证的准确区分。证的区分，采用“四诊法”，具有主观性和可变性的缺点。随着从系统整体角度研究人体功能活动的组学技术的发展，它越来越多地应用于中医证的客观性区分和理解其生物学机制的研究中。本文综述了中医证临床区分研究、潜在的组学技术的文献，并指出了四种组学技术（基因组学、转录组学、蛋白质组学和代谢组学）相关文章的增加趋势，以及证的区分与组学研究结果之间的相关性。此外，本文总结了常见研究疾病和中医证中组学应用的典型案例，并讨论了证的区分研究中的主要问题及对策。本文的工作可为利用组学技术进行中医证的区分研究提供参考。
