The preliminary development and clinical verification of the positive index score scale of “Heart Arthralgia Syndrome”

BACKGROUND: In recent years, the age of onset for coronary heart disease (CHD) has become one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The medical treatments occasionally cause side effects; therefore, there is still an urgent need to develop new therapeutic modalities for CHD in clinical practice. "Heart Arthralgia Syndrome (HAS)" is a general term for CHD with arthralgia symptoms proposed by our team based on clinical experience. At present, there is little in-depth research on the treatment of HAS by TCM. Pick Complex Therapy (PCT) is an innovative and developed theory of collateral acupuncture therapy for HAS. METHODS: We collected data from 276 patients who met the criteria for (coronary heart disease with numbness of neck, shoulder, waist, and leg). We selected 24 diagnostic criteria for HAS by means of multiple methods, including Cronbach’s α coefficient, retest reliability, subjective evaluation, discrete trend, Pearson’s rank correlation coefficient and factor analysis method. We thereafter evaluated the reliability, validity and responsiveness of the scale. In the clinical validation phase, we verified whether the preliminary developed positive index (PI) scale can guide clinical practice. Forty (40) patients with HAS were selected in the study. SPSS23.0 statistical software was used for statistical processing and analysis. RESULTS: Assessment results of the initial PI scale for HAS: the average time to complete the scale was 7.47 ± 3.59 minutes. Cronbach’s α coefficient for the initial table was 0.711, the retest reliability was 0.897, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test result was 0.844, and the Bartlett test result was 2502.300. Following maximum variance rotation analysis, the cumulative variance contribution rate was determined to be 66.605%. In the clinical validation phase of the PI scale, we tested 40 patients before and after the PCT treatments. After 3 measurements, the correlation between the PI scale for HAS and the angina pectoris grading scoring method table decreased gradually. The last 2 measurement results of study indicated that there was a significant correlation between the PI scale and thrombin time, while physical and chemical examination showed no significant changes. CONCLUSION: The PI scale for HAS can be widely used in the clinic as a preliminary evaluation tool for guiding PCT.