The Concept of Sasang Health Index and Constitution-Based Health Assessment: An Integrative Model with Computerized Four Diagnosis Methods

Sasang constitutional medicine (SCM) shares its philosophy with that of personalized medicine: it provides constitution-specific treatment and healthcare individualized for each patient. In this work, we propose the concept of the Sasang Health Index (SHI) as an attempt to assess the individualized health status in the framework of SCM. From the target population of females in their fifties and older, we recruited 298 subjects and collected their physiological data, including complexion, radial pulse, and voice, and their questionnaire responses. The health status of each subject was evaluated by two Korean medical doctors independently, and the SHI model was obtained by combining all the integrative features of the phenotype data using a regression technique. As a result, most subjects belonged to either the healthy, subhealthy, or slightly diseased group, and the intraclass correlation coefficient between the two doctors' health scoring reached 0.95. We obtained an SHI model for each constitution type with adjusted R-squares of 0.50, 0.56, and 0.30, for the TE, SE, and SY constitution types, respectively. In the proposed SHI model, the significant characteristics used in the health assessment consisted of constitution-specific features in accordance with the classic literature and features common to all the constitution types.