| Depression is a kind of disease mainly featured with symptoms of depression, slow mentality and hypobulia and mixed with common mental diseases related to multiple clinical symptoms of body and mentality. With the progress of society, the social life today is becoming more and more complex, so the morbidity of depression increases gradually and it has become a common mental disease. Depression not only seriously affects the life and work of the sufferer but also causes great loss and economic burdern for the society. It is estimated that in 2020 depression will be the second seriousest disease following CVD. A lot of advantages and experience in terms of Chinese traditional medicine have been accumulated in the long course of curing depression.However, because of different understandings about this disease in the academic field of Chinese traditional medicine, the improvement of the clinical effects of curing this disease is affected and further researches about it was also hindered. As in curing disease the principle of "discriminating of symptoms and signs" has to be followed, the treatment effect is determined by the correct discrimination of symptoms and signs of depressionIn recent scores of years, the research about symptoms is always the key and difficult point of Chinese traditional medical research area and has been listed in NSFC and 973 Basic Research Plans. A large amount of researches about issues like the definition, connotation of Chinese traditional medical symptoms, the normalized diagnostic standards of symptoms and the quantification of the diagnosis of symptoms have been carried out and some achievements have been made, which is very meaningful to clinical diagnosis and further research. For this purpose, this dissertation was to explore and comb ancient documents and modern documents, analyze data, summarize the relevant symptoms, signs of depression and the distribution features of the elements of those symptoms to extract common medicine combinations and the relevant relationship between these combinations and symptoms to provide data support for establishing clinical diagnostic standards for symptoms and symptom elements of depression.The understandings about depression in the perspective of Chinese traditional medicine are diverse among modern scholars. Some scholars believed that this disease belongs to the category of depression syndrome; some think that it should be "hysteria", and some others take it as delirium or globus hysteriocus.In this paper, the diagnosis about depression according to modern western medicine and symptoms about depression according to ancient Chinese medical records were compared to illustrate the understandings about depression by Chinese traditional medicine.At present, the understandings about depression can be found in the second edition of Pragmatic Chinese Traditional Internal Medicine compiled by academician Wang Yongyan, in which this disease refers to a class of symptoms of the retardant of five internal organs caused by depressed emotion and qi stagnation. The name of this disease stems from Su Wen On Sources of Disease. The symptoms of depression can be categorized into two types in broad and narrow senses, respectively.In broad sense, the depression symptoms include symptoms caused by emotion fluctuation, exogenous pathogenic, food and so on. In narrow sense, depression symptoms refer to qi stagnation caused by seven emotions. The main symptoms, as Jing Yue Pandect-Depression points out, were that "depression hurts spleen and leads to acid regurgitation and vomiting," "if depression hurts spleen and lungs, a person will suffer from drowsiness, palpitation and lassitude and no-appetite," and "if a person worries too much, he will lose qi and blood and will eat less and less." The second edition of Pragmatic Chinese Traditional Internal Medicine emphasizes the importance of "six symptoms of depression" and pointed out that stasis of qi will lead to symptoms of depression like deprementia, uneasiness, swelling and aches of chest, etc. which are common symptoms of depression.Based on these symptoms, other stasis will appear and related symptoms will appear such as blood stagnancy:it is combined with swollen and aching chest and ribs or stabbing pains, of which the place is fixed and petechia and bruise can be found on tongue; fire syndromes:impatience, tendency to be angry, suppression in the chest, aching ribs, uncomfortable stomach, acid saliva, feeling thirsty and bitter, constipation, red tongue, yellow coating on the tongue, bowstring like pulse... Thus, it can be seen that these symptoms like bad appetite, lassitude, and amnesia conform to depression.Therefore, it is undoubted that depression belongs to depression syndrome.The first part of this paper was to utilize structural and standard data collection platform to classify medicines recorded in the prescriptions of Chinese Medical Classics for curing depression with strict quality controlled and analyzed the relevance between the medicine group and symptoms of depression by using the principle of conforming between prescription and symptoms to find out the distribution law of Chinese medicines to explore and testify the relationship between symptoms and treatment strategies. The second part of this paper was to use SPSS 15.0 stasticial software to count and analyze the frequency of symptoms, syndromes, elements of these syndromes researches about depression based on searching and clearing up related researches about depression in the past ten years to explore distributions of common symptoms, syndromes and related elements.The results showed that there are 169 prescriptions recorded in Chinese Medical Classics and the drugs in the prescriptions for regulating vital energy (qi) appear most frequently, namely 134 times (6.78%of the total number); the frequencies of other drugs were as follows: Qi-tonifying drugs,95 times (4.81%), nourishing heart and calming spirit drugs,91 times (4.61%), tonifying Yin medicine 87 times (4.4%), eliminating phlegm drugs 86 times (4.35%), clearing heat and detoxifying drugs 79 times (4.0%), enriching blood and regulating qi drugs 74 times (3.74%), aiding digestion drugs 69 times (3.49%), restraining Yang of liver drugs 69 times (3.49%), clearing heat and fire drugs 68 times (3.44%).Analysis about the key elements of symptoms of depression in Chinese Medical Classics and related prescriptions showed that the highest symptom distribution frequency of common symptoms and syndrome elements was "stagnancy of qi", namely 230 times (16.43%of the total number); the other symptoms'frequencies were as follows:"deficiency of qi" 95 times (6.79%), "deficiency of Yin",87 times(6.22%), phlegm 86 times (6.15%), deficiency of blood 74(5.29%), wrong circulation of qi,69 times (4.93%), indigestion,69 times(4.93%), "fire",68 times (4.86%), stagnancy of blood 57 times (4.07%), "Yang rising" 49 times (3.43%), "Yin rising"48 times (3.43%), " wind" 47 times (3.36%), "dampness" 46 times (3.36%),and "internal fire" 41 times (2.93%). Thus, it can be seen that the ancient doctors'treatment about depression reflect its etiology characteristics:the disease roots mainly include "stagnancy of qi", "phlegm", "wrong circulation of qi", "indigestion" and "fire", "blood stasis", which were the most common ones. In terms of deficiency of body, there were mainly deficiencies of "qi", "Yin" and "blood", etc.In addition, in modern documents there were 249 kinds of symptoms, which could be classified into 86 types and the total frequency of these symptoms was 2417 times. The first five kinds of symptom types were:stagnancy of liver qi (377,15.60%), stagnancy of liver and deficiency of spleen (344,13.81%), deficiency of heart and spleen (277,11.21%), Yin deficiency of liver and kidney (217,8.98%), liver stagnancy and stasis of phlegm (187,7.74%),of which the total frequency was 1386 times, which toked up 57.34%of all the symptoms and syndromes.Most doctors think that symptoms of depression are mainly depression and stagnancy of qi. This disease is mainly caused by the discordances of internal organs hurt by emotion and stagnancy of liver-qi, namely, liver, spleen, heart and kidney are affected and discordances of blood and qi. When the emotion adjustment of the body is affected by the repeated and long lasting pessimal stimulations beyond normal boundary of physiology, the dispersion functions of liver is affected, which leads to stagnancy of liver and failure feelings, such as high psychological pressure, excessive thinking, loss of spleen qi, hurt of heart and blood and deficiency of heart and spleen, which then leads to loss of blood and droop of spirit. When there is too much thinking and lassitude, spleen will be unhealthy to hurt liver, thus causing stagnancy of liver and deficiency of spleen. If such kind of disease lasts long, heat or fire will emerge and blood will lose, which in turn leads to Yin deficiency of liver and kidney.The research result based on ancient documents was basically in concord with modern understandings about the etiology of depression and its symptoms and key elements. This research result will on a certain degree complement the absence of the record about symptoms, syndrome elements of this disease, etiology and mechanism, and application of medicine in ancient documents and will also be some bases of theoretical research and formulating of standards. Moreover, the research about the distribution, combination law of symptoms and syndrome elements in the perspective of Chinese traditional medicine will be studied based on modern documents and statistics method. Research results show that the distribution characters about common symptoms, syndromes and elements in modern documents provide objective bases for formulating Chinese traditional medical diagnosis standards and treatment evaluation standards for curing depression.
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