Dry eye disease (DED) is a multifactorial illness with an increasingly high global prevalence and multiple risk factors that widely influences patients’ daily lives. It is essential to identify treatments with few or no side effects for patients with DED. We have reviewed studies published from 2001 to 2020 that investigated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and integrated Chinese and Western medicine for DED treatment. Current Chinese medicines used in DED therapy were categorized into four types, namely anti-oxidants, anti-inflammatory agents, hormone-like agents, and cell-repairing agents. Compound herbs, including Chi-Ju-Di-Huang-Wan and Qiming granule, can effectively alleviate dry eye symptoms. Moreover, patients with DED who were treated with Western medicine combined with TCM experienced significantly magnified therapeutic effects and reasonable costs of treatment. In conclusion, TCM can be a promising approach for treating DED, and combined treatment with TCM and Western drugs may represent a new strategy for improving the curative effect.

Background and objective: Dry eye disease (DED) is a relatively common disorder associated with abnormal tear film and the ocular surface that causes ocular irritation, dryness, visual impairment, and damage to the cornea. DED is not a life-threatening disease but causes discomfort and multifactorial disorders in vision that affect daily life. It has been reported that all traditional medicinal plants exhibit anti-inflammatory effects on several diseases. We hypothesized that the decoction ameliorated ocular irritation and decreased cytokine expression in the cornea. This study aimed to investigate the molecular mechanisms of DED and discover a therapeutic strategy to reduce corneal inflammation. Material and Methods: We used a DED mouse model with extraorbital lacrimal gland (ELG) excision and treated the mice with a decoction of five traditional medicines: Lycium chinense, Cuscuta chinensis, Senna tora, Ophiopogon japonicus, and Dendrobium nobile for 3 months. The tear osmolarity and the ocular surface staining were evaluated as indicators of DED. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the level of inflammation on the cornea. Results: After treatment with the decoction for three months, epithelial erosions and desquamation were reduced, the intact of corneal endothelium was maintained, and tear osmolarity was restored in the eyes. The IL-1β-associated inflammatory response was reduced in the cornea in the DED model. Conclusions: These data suggested that a mixture of traditional medicines might be a novel therapy to treat DED.

Multiscale entropy (MSE) of physiological signals may reflect cardiovascular health in diabetes. The classic MSE (cMSE) algorithm requires more than 750 signals for the calculations. The modified short-time MSE (sMSE) may have inconsistent outcomes compared with the cMSE at large time scales and in a disease status. Therefore, we compared the cMSE of 1500 (cMSE₁₅₀₀) consecutive and 1000 photoplethysmographic (PPG) pulse amplitudes with the sMSE of 500 PPG (sMSE₅₀₀) pulse amplitudes of bilateral fingertips among middle- to old-aged individuals with or without type 2 diabetes. We discovered that cMSE₁₅₀₀ had the smallest value across scale factors 1–10, followed by cMSE₁₀₀₀, and then sMSE₅₀₀ in both hands. The cMSE₁₅₀₀, cMSE₁₀₀₀ and sMSE₅₀₀ did not differ at each scale factor in both hands of persons without diabetes and in the dominant hand of those with diabetes. In contrast, the sMSE₅₀₀ differed at all scales 1–10 in the non-dominant hand with diabetes. In conclusion, autonomic dysfunction, prevalent in the non-dominant hand which had a low local physical activity in the person with diabetes, might be imprecisely evaluated by the sMSE; therefore, using more PPG signal numbers for the cMSE is preferred in such a situation.

Multiscale cross-approximate entropy (MC-ApEn) between two different physiological signals could evaluate cardiovascular health in diabetes. Whether MC-ApEn analysis between two similar signals such as photoplethysmographic (PPG) pulse amplitudes of bilateral fingertips can reflect diabetes status is unknown. From a middle-to-old-aged population free of prior cardiovascular disease, we selected the unaffected (no type 2 diabetes, n = 36), the well-controlled diabetes (glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) < 8%, n = 30), and the poorly- controlled diabetes (HbA1c ≥ 8%, n = 26) groups. MC-ApEn indexes were calculated from simultaneous consecutive 1500 PPG pulse amplitudes signals of bilateral index fingertips. The average of scale factors 1–5 (MC-ApEn_SS) and of scale factors 6–10 (MC-ApEn_LS) were defined as the small- and large-scales MC-ApEn, respectively. The MC-ApEn_LS index was highest in the unaffected, followed by the well-controlled diabetes, and then the poorly-controlled diabetes (0.70, 0.62, and 0.53; all paired p-values were <0.05); in contrast, the MC-ApEn_SS index did not differ between groups. Our findings suggested that the bilateral fingertips large-scale MC-ApEn_LS index of PPG pulse amplitudes might be able to evaluate the glycemic status and detect subtle vascular disease in type 2 diabetes.

This study aimed to establish a method for fast and accurate determination of body constitution types from the body constitution questionnaire (BCQ) by employing a decision tree model. The model was trained for 4 classes, namely, Yin-Xu, Yang-Xu, Phlegm and Blood Stasis, and Normal, and it achieved 67% accuracy for the testing dataset. The model also reduced the required number of BCQ questions from 44 to 3–6, depending on the responses. Lastly, we developed the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) body constitution online diagnosis system using our model to collect data digitally and use it more practically and efficiently. This system can assist doctors to improve the diagnosis and treatment in TCM practice.