[Inspirations of Rome Ⅳ on clinical evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine for functional gastrointestinal...

The Rome Foundation released the Rome Ⅳ for functional gastrointestinal diseases (FGIDs) in 2016, which fully presented the latest advances and views on the disease origin, definition, diagnosis, classification, pathology, mechanism, clinical features, influential factors, interventions, clinical evaluation, clinical research design and so on, showing high positive effects on global researches. Traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) have cognitive advantages and well-recognized and-demonstrated efficacy in the prevention and treatment for FGIDs. However, the monotonous presentation ways and weak interpretation on clinical evaluation have also hindered the inherent advantages explanation, characteristics quantization, evidence and communication accumulation. This study first analyzed the background and key points on clinical evaluation of Rome Ⅳ and corresponding inspirations, believed that its concept and viewpoints were assimilated with systematic medicine, and emphasized the important influence of subjective factors such as mental psychology and social culture on the disease and its importance in clinical evaluation. Its views on several aspects such as the theoretical model, internal and external causes, and transfer process were highly consistent with TCM. Therefore, TCM researchers should devote more dedication and courage on the innovation and collaboration with global researches to advance related studies. Then, based on 59 TCM clinical researches for FGIDs funded by national projects upon searching in CNKI with strict search strategy, the clinical evaluation methods and indexes and their correlations were summarized and analyzed, and it was found that more attention was paid to the disease symptoms and impact, symptom/syndrome score, patient report outcome, et al. However, many limitations were also founded, such as disordered relationships among different indexes, ambiguous explanation of research results, and extremely few domestic evaluation instruments in Chinese culture. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should regress and highlight the subjective features of patients and diseases, standardize the elemental structure and management mode of clinical evaluation, enhance the values and status of reported outcomes. It is highly recommended that the domestic disease-specific instruments developed in Chinese culture should be adopted as primary outcome for clinical evaluation, assisted with symptoms/signs assessment tools and doctors reporting outcome scale, et al. The common used TCM syndrome scores in current researches are not recommended as the primary outcome. However, there are some limitations in the above suggestions. We hope that more relevant researches will explore and establish a unified outcome assessment system for FGIDs and improve the quality of TCM clinical research.