Comparative Analysis of Clinical and Medication Information between Chronic Hepatitis B Patients with Damp Heat Syndrome and Spleen Deficiency Syndrome

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history in the treatment of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) based on the syndrome identification. Previous studies reported CHB patients with damp-heat (DH) syndrome accompanied with a severe liver function damage, but lacked the medication analysis. In this study, we analyzed 999 CHB patients with unidentified individual-level data from database to explore clinical features of two common syndromes of CHB patients based on the real world. Compared with the spleen deficiency (SD) syndrome, the CHB patients with DH syndrome had a significantly higher level of alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) (P < 0.05) but took more immunomodulators and hepatoprotective drugs (P < 0.1). Similarly, in the follow-up of 207 patients after 3 months, the improvement trend of ALT and AST of patients with sustained SD syndrome was significantly better than those whose TCM syndrome changed from SD to DH (P < 0.05). The logistic model indicated DH syndrome was a significant negative factor for reducing ALT level in CHB patients (OR = 4.854, P=0.032). This study suggests that CHB patients with DH syndrome have potentially more serious and sustained liver damage than the SD syndrome, which provides a reference for the personalized management of CHB patients from the perspective of TCM syndromes.