Using the Symptom Patient Similarity Network to Explore the Difference between the Chinese and Western Medicine Pathways of Ischemic Stroke and its Comorbidities

Background and Objectives. The development of network medicine provides new opportunities for disease research. Ischemic stroke has a high incidence, disability, and recurrence rate, and one of the reasons is that it is often accompanied by other complex diseases, including risk factors, complications, and comorbidities. Network medicine was used to try to analyze the characteristics of IS-related diseases and find out the differences in genetic pathways between Chinese herbs and Western drugs. Methods. Individualized treatment of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) provides a theoretical basis for the study of the personalized classification of complex diseases. Utilizing the TCM clinical electronic medical records (EMRs) of 7170 in patients with IS, a patient similarity network (PSN) with shared symptoms was constructed. Next, patient subgroups were identified using community detection methods and enrichment analyses were performed. Finally, genetic data of symptoms, herbs, and drugs were used for pathway and GO analysis to explore the characteristics of pathways of subgroups and to compare the similarities and differences in genetic pathways of herbs and drugs from the perspective of molecular pathways of symptoms. Results. We identified 34 patient modules from the PSN, of which 7 modules include 98.48% of the whole cases. The 7 patient subgroups have their own characteristics of risk factors, complications, and comorbidities and the underlying genetic pathways of symptoms, drugs, and herbs. Each subgroup has the largest number of herb pathways. For specific symptom pathways, the number of herb pathways is more than that of drugs. Conclusion. The research of disease classification based on community detection of symptom-shared patient networks is practical; the common molecular pathway of symptoms and herbs reflects the rationality of TCM herbs on symptoms and the wide range of therapeutic targets.