Developing diagnostic criteria of illness of traditional medicine on patients with carpal tunnel syndrome by a descriptive cross-sectional survey

Abstract

Background and Objective: Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is one of the most common neurodegenerative conditions. However, studies on the classifications and symptoms of CTS from the perspective of traditional medicine are still limited. Our study aims to identify traditional medicine disease nomenclature and symptoms of CTS by the survey form. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at The 3rd branch of University Medical Center HCMC, Thong Nhat Hospital from March 2021 to June 2021. We conducted a study survey on patients diagnosed with primary CTS and agreed to participate in the study with survey questionnaires, data were processed by using Excel 2016 and Lantern 5.0 software. Results: 48 symptoms collected from 94 patients with CTS based on questionnaires were included in the Latent Tree Model. Compared with the medical literature review, there were 40/48 symptoms and 5 patterns appearing in the collected sample. These 5 main patterns: Blood stasis has 4 symptoms, yin deficiency has 6 symptoms, damp heat has 3 symptoms, blood deficiency has 3 symptoms and invasion of meridians of wind cold has 3 symptoms to diagnose. The results of the study have shown that the results of the algorithms are statistically significant when comparing clusters of latent variables with traditional medicine descriptions. Therefore, the use of the results of the machine has a scientific basis in terms of statistics. Conclusion: After analyzing clinical data from 94 patients with Latent Tree Model, it was found that 5 disease patterns appeared with symptoms helping diagnose those disease patterns.