Exploration of the mechanism of pattern-specific treatments in coronary heart disease with network pharmacology approach

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) pattern is a valuable classification method in the treatment of complex disease such as coronary heart disease (CHD). In accordance to TCM patterns, our ancestors created many pertinent TCM formulae, which have been used in China for thousands of years and are still playing an important role in China today. However, the biological mechanism of TCM pattern-specific formulae remains elusive. In this paper, we chose CHD patterns (Qi-stagnation induced blood-stasis syndrome, abbreviated as QSB; Qi-deficiency induced blood-stasis syndrome, abbreviated as QDB) as examples to illustrate the mechanism of their pattern-specific formulae. Using entity grammar systems (EGS) formalism, we built two pharmacologic networks of the formulae and obtained the intersection and difference networks by network comparison. Then we analyzed their common and different mechanisms for treating CHD by GO enrichment analysis. The results indicate that QDB-specific formula takes more special molecular paths to treat CHD, which contribute to more severe pathological changes in comparison with QSB. In this paper, we achieved a better understanding of the pharmacological characteristics of CHD patterns-specific formulae, which is beneficial to explore different therapies for a disease to enhance the effectiveness and pertinence of treatment.