Medication Patterns of Ginseng for Diabetes Mellitus Treatment: A Patent Analysis

Purpose: Chinese medicine patent information contains a wealth of high-value technical information, and the aim of this paper is to study the dosing pattern of ginseng in the treatment of diabetes mellitus based on the data of the invention patents that have been granted in China. Method:We screened the herb combination patents on ginseng for diabetes treatment in China's national patent database, and used Excel software to statistically analyze the frequency of use, the four qi, the five flavors, the attribution, and the efficacy attributes of the herbs;Use R language to conduct drug association rule analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis, and visualize the results. Results: A total of 104 ginseng prescription patents for the treatment of diabetes mellitus were included for analysis, which involved 264 types of traditional Chinese medicine, with a total frequency of 1,410 times of medication, and the top 53 high-frequency traditional Chinese medicine were, in order, astragalus, pueraria lobata, dioscorea opposita. The four qi of the herbs were mainly warm, neutral and cold, and the five flavors were mainly sweet, pungent and bitter, most of them belonged to the liver, lung, spleen and stomach meridians, and the main efficacy of theChinese medicine used was focused on tonifying the deficiency and clearing heat. Commonly used herb combinations include ginseng-astragalus-pueraria lobata, ginseng-astragalus-dioscorea opposita. Cluster analysis yielded three groups of core herb combinations, with group 1 consisting of ginseng, anemarrhena asphodeloides, salvia miltiorrhiza, coptis chinensis, and rehmannia; group 2 consisting of ginseng, schisandra chinensis, dioscorea opposita, astragalus, pueraria lobata, radix trichosanthis, radix ophiopogonis, and radix rehmanniae recens; and group 3 consisting of ginseng, polygonatum sibiricum, lycium barba rum, cornus officinalis, poria cocos, prepared rehmannia, and atractylodes macrocephala. Conclusions: Most of the traditional Chinese medicine used in the treatment of diabetes mellitus with ginseng are based on qi nourishing and blood nourishing, heat-clearing and yin nourishingChinese medicine, which are in line with the characteristics of diabetes mellitus of yin deficiency, dryness and heat, and deficiency of qi and blood. The patent prescription of ginseng for the treatment of diabetes mellitus and the rules of compounding are not only of practical guidance significance, but also provide new ideas for the herb formulation for the treatment of diabetes mellitus.