Network Analysis of Predicted Therapeutic Symptoms in National Health Insurance Herbal Prescriptions

National Health Insurance Herbal prescriptions (NHPs) are widely used; however, their multi-component composition complicates mechanistic interpretation and impedes the development of evidence-based approaches in traditional medicine and healthcare policy. In this study, we applied a systems biology approach to link molecular mechanisms to clinical effects.

From 56 NHPs, 13 with sufficient clinical evidence were selected. Multi-layer networks connecting herbs, ingredients, genes, and diseases were constructed using SymMap, with interactions filtered for oral bioavailability and statistical significance (false discovery rate < 0.05). Network-predicted diseases were validated against a clinically validated benchmark using permutation-based null model analysis, and gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was used to identify key molecular pathways.

Networks predicted an average of 1359 diseases per NHP, reflecting their polypharmacology. Importantly, the overall predicted disease sets for 10 of 13 NHPs showed statistically significant overlap with known clinical uses (p < 0.05, several with p < 0.001). GSEA indicated that NHPs commonly modulate three biological axes-hormone-metabolic regulation, neural signaling, and cell proliferation control.

NHPs act as potential systemic homeostasis regulators. Our study introduces a computationally validated framework integrating network pharmacology with permutation-based statistical testing, providing a data-driven rationale for NHP use. These computational findings are exploratory and require future biological and clinical validation.