Psychiatric insights into liver cirrhosis and their correlations with traditional Chinese medicine diagnostics

We studied various psychiatric attributes in the categories of depression, anxiety and insomnia on 208 patients with liver cirrhosis, 61 patients with non-cirrhosis chronic diseases, and 60 healthy people. A set of psychiatric attributes were found to be uniquely associated with cirrhosis. Literature shows that these attributes are related to some mechanisms underlying liver cirrhosis, such as zinc/selenium deficiency and vitamin D deficiency. In addition, we investigated the relationships between those psychiatric attributes unique to cirrhosis and the “four diagnostic methods” of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and discovered interesting correlations. The above two findings can shed new light on the diagnosis and prognosis of liver cirrhosis, and the integration of Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine in the future.