Quantitative Methods for Traditional Chinese Medicine Development

Chapter 6

Factor Analysis and Principal Component Analysis

6.1 Introduction

As indicated earlier, most Western medicines contain single active ingredients for treating patients with the specific disease (e.g., cancer) under study. Statistical methods for clinical evaluation of the active ingredient in terms of some well-defined study endpoints (e.g., response rate, time to disease progression, and median survival time) are well established. Unlike Western medicines, most traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) often consist of multiple components (active and inactive). Thus, standard methods for clinical evaluation of Western medicines cannot be applied directly to evaluate the safety and efficacy of TCMs. In practice, TCMs can be viewed as combinational ...