Analysis of Herbal Mechanisms and Prescriptions for Chronic Cerebral Circulatory Insufficiency Based on Data Mining and Network Pharmacology

Background: Traditional Chinese medicine has accumulated rich resources and experience through clinical research to explore the prevention and treatment of chronic cerebral circulatory insufficiency, but current medicine lacks in-depth research and confirmation on the established protocols and mechanism of prescribed TCMs at the macro and micro levels. Objective: To explore the prescription of Chinese medicines for the treatment of Chronic Cerebral Circulation Insufficiency (CCCI) and to explore the mechanism of core drugs. Methods: 229 Chinese prescriptions for CCCI were collected from CNKI, CBM, VIP and WANFANG databases for this study. The frequency and association rules of drugs were analyzed and the core drugs by TCMISSV2.5 software was extracted. The active ingredients and targets were obtained by TCMSP, and genes of CCCI were collected from the DisGeNET, OMIM, DrugBank disease databases. The intersection targets of herbal medicine and disease were imported into the STRING database for PPI network. The key targets were screened by the network topology algorithm. The Systems Dock website was used to verify the molecular docking. The GOEAST and DAVID tools were used to perform GO and KEGG pathway analysis with the key target genes. Results: 117 drugs involved in 229 prescriptions were identified, 2 core drugs were identified. We identified 8 active ingredients, which were mandenol, myricanone, perlolyrine, senkyunone, wallichilide, sitosterol, beta-sitosterol and stigmasterol. 371 herbal targets predicted and 335 disease targets. The enrichment analysis showed that the core herbal medicines could prevent CCCI by 15 key signaling pathways. Conclusion: There are direct or indirect connections in key signaling pathways, which not only participate in energy metabolism, hormone regulation, signal transduction, but also play a role in the comprehensive intervention of nervous system, immune system, circulatory system and other systems, which is consistent with the comprehensive pathogenesis of CCCI induced by multiple factors.