The traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) Zheng (or syndrome) is an outcome of analysis on TCM information by TCM practitioner. Zheng classification is a traditional diagnostic method to categorize the patients based on their different conditions. Currently combination of Zheng classification and biomedical diagnosis becomes a common model in diagnostics in TCM clinical practice. Clinical treatments of a patient rely on the successful differentiation of a specific TCM Zheng.

Recently a great progress has been made in the clinical studies focusing on the exploration of effect of TCM interventions in the patients with clarified TCM Zheng in some certain diseases. The clinical studies with TCM Zheng classification will lead to personalized therapeutic strategies. We believe it will be a hot topic in the coming years for the basic and clinical research.

We invite investigators to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will apply Zheng classification to basic research, clinical practice, and clinical research to improve the efficacy of TCM interventions, and further lead to personalized treatment. The information obtained from these studies shall be clearly evidence-based. We are particularly interested in articles describing the clinical trials with TCM Zheng classification, Zheng classification methodology from clinical data, systematic reviews on clinical studies using Zheng classification, clinical practice guideline or expert consensus focused on TCM Zheng in certain of diseases, reviews on clinical practice guidelines or expert consensus related to Zheng classification, and the clinical pharmacological evaluation on TCM interventions using the omics methods as well as bioinformatics. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Randomized clinical trials designed with Zheng classification
• Zheng classification-based systematic reviews on clinical trials
• Zheng classification-based clinical practice guideline or expert consensus
• Clinical trial protocols based on TCM Zheng classification
• Clinical pharmacological studies based on Zheng classification
• Reviews on clinical practice guidelines based on Zheng classification
• Data mining on clinical data for ZHENG classification
• Recent advances in ZHENG classification-based clinical trials

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