Network analysis for anti-rheumatoid arthritis TCM prescriptions

A typical characteristic of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is that TCM practitioners always prescribe different herbal formulae according to the condition of individual patients, making TCM as a kind of personalized medicine. In this study, we conducted a network analysis to evaluate the prescription rules underlying a set of anti-rheumatoid arthritis (RA) prescriptions collected from a TCM master in China, Mr. Ji-Ren Li. A herb network-compound network-disease network workflow was established for the TCM prescription analysis. Then the core herb network was constructed from 871 anti-RA prescriptions. We further demonstrated that the potential biological activities exerted by the herbs from the core network are significantly associated with the RA genes in terms of GO biological processes. The results give evidence for the effectiveness and reasonableness of herb formulae prescribed by Mr. Li.