Objective: To explore the correlations between symptom-based principal factors of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and the effect of traditional Chinese medicine or Western medicine on RA after factor analysis of RA symptoms.
Methods: Four hundred and thirteen RA patients from 9 clinical centers were included in the clinical trial. They were randomly divided into Western medicine (WM) treated group with 204 cases and traditional Chinese medicine (CM) treated group with 209 cases. A complete physical examination and 18 common clinical manifestations were recorded before the randomization and after the treatment. The WM therapy included voltaren extended action tablet, methotrexate and sulfasalazine. The CM therapy included glucosidorum Tripterygll totorum tablet and Yishen Juanbi Tablet. The American College of Rheumatology 20 (ACR20) was used for efficacy evaluation. All data were analyzed on SAS 8.2 statistical package. Eighteen symptoms in the RA patients were analyzed by factor analysis and the relationships between the factors and effects were analyzed with Chi-Square test.
Results: Four principal factors were obtained from the analysis results of the 18 symptoms. The factors could represent the symptoms related to joints, cold-syndrome, deficiency syndrome and heat-syndrome in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), respectively. The effect of WM therapy was better than CM therapy. After 12 weeks of treatment, the effect of CM on patients without deficiency-syndrome was better than the patients with deficiency-syndrome. After 24 weeks of treatment, WM therapy showed better effect on patients with cold syndrome than patients without cold syndrome.
Conclusion: The results based on the factor analysis of RA symptoms are similar to the results of syndrome differentiation of TCM, and the factor-related different categories of symptoms are associated with the curative effect, thus further research on the symptoms is necessary.