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  What Is IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome)? 4 Introduction Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a common digestive disorder that affects the large intestine. It can cause discomfort and changes in bowel habits. Symptoms Abdominal pain or cramping Bloating Gas Diarrhea or constipation Causes Stress Food sensitivities Gut-brain interaction issues Hormonal changes Treatment Avoid trigger foods Manage stress Eat fiber-rich foods Medications if needed Conclusion Although IBS is not life-threatening, it can affect your quality of life. Managing diet and stress is key.
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an encyclopaedia of traditional Chinese medicine

  



an encyclopaedia of traditional Chinese medicine




Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is not only an effective solution for primary health care, but also a great resource for drug innovation and discovery. To meet the increasing needs for TCM-related data resources, we developed ETCM, an Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Medicine. ETCM includes comprehensive and standardized information for the commonly used herbs and formulas of TCM, as well as their ingredients. The herb basic property and quality control standard, formula composition, ingredient drug-likeness, as well as many other information provided by ETCM can serve as a convenient resource for users to obtain thorough information about a herb or a formula. To facilitate functional and mechanistic studies of TCM, ETCM provides predicted target genes of TCM ingredients, herbs, and formulas, according to the chemical fingerprint similarity between TCM ingredients and known drugs. A systematic analysis function is also developed in ETCM, which allows users to explore the relationships or build networks among TCM herbs, formulas,ingredients, gene targets, and related pathways or diseases. ETCM is freely accessible at http://www.nrc.ac.cn:9090/ETCM/



. We expect ETCM to develop into a major data warehouse for TCM and to promote TCM related researches and drug development in the future.

Issue Section:
 Database Issue

INTRODUCTION

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) holds great potentials for health improvement as well as prevention and treatment of various diseases, especially complex diseases such as autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular diseases and cancers (1–3). TCM is also a great resource for modern drug research and development. Many TCM-derived drugs have shown remarkable effects in curing diseases, such as artemisinin, digitoxin, quinine and celastrol. The most recognized effect of TCM is the use of artemisinin-based remedies to treat malaria, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2015 (4). After that, growing attention has been attracted to TCM, which also brought the increasing needs for TCM related data resources.

Herbs are the most commonly used substances in TCM. Over 11 000 herb plants have been recorded in various TCM related pharmacopeia, and the commonly used ones are ∼700 species. As TCM usually combines multiple herbs as formulas in disease treatments, thousands of herbal formulas have been generated and widely applied in clinics. In theory, TCM herbal formulas contain multiple effective ingredients, thus can simultaneously regulate many targets within cells, therefore to reestablish balanced physiological regulatory networks of patients and to cure diseases (5,6). Yet the molecular targets of most TCM formulas and ingredients still remain elusive, which becomes one of the biggest hurdles in the application of TCM and TCM-based drug discovery.

The recent development of several TCM-related databases, such as HIT (7), TCMGeneDIT (8), TCM-MESH (9), TCM-ID (10), TCMSP (11), TCMID (12,13), have provided useful data and tools for TCM-based research and drug discovery. Yet most databases only focus on herbs and their components, thus the relationships between formulas and herbs/components are missing. None of these databases provide the habitat and quality control information of herbs, which is considered as a major factor for the effectiveness of TCM. In addition, the design of some databases are obsolete, with limited information and are difficult to use. Here, we present ETCM, an Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Medicine (http://www.nrc.ac.cn:9090/ETCM/), which includes multiple aspects of clinical and functional essential information on 403 TCM herb species, 3962 TCM formulas, 7274 herbal ingredients, 2266 validated or predicted drug targets, as well as 3027 related diseases. All these information is comprehensively linked to each other in the database and displayed with user friendly interfaces, which can serve as a valuable resource for TCM-related research and drug discovery.



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