A network-based analysis of the types of coronary artery disease from traditional Chinese medicine perspective: Potential for therapeutics and drug discovery

Coronary heart disease (CAD) is one of the most dangerous threats to human health due to its high incidence and high mortality. CAD has several major types, such as blood stasis and qi deficiency, according to the syndromes of diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which are treated with different herbs or compound prescriptions. The current review aims to decipher the underlying connections between the major types and CAD in the TCM framework. We attempt to take the known herbs as the probe to uncover the potential mechanism between the major types and CAD by connecting the drugs, targets and diseases so as to obtain compound-target-disease associations for reconstructing the biologically-meaningful networks. For example, we take the three key herbs for blood stasis treatment as an example to explore the pharmacological mechanism of treatment of blood stasis of CAD.289