The ancient, Present and Future Prospects of Tongue Manifestation

Tongue inspection with a long history is one of the most distinctive methods in diagnosis of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The emergence and improvement of tongue inspection theory is the crystallization of countless ancient medical doctors' wisdom. We should combine the theory of tongue inspection and modern technology and interchange TCM and western medicine, which is conducive to clinical research and promotes the objective development of tongue inspection, achieving the inheritance of TCM and creating TCM of our time. Keywords: tongue inspection; ancient; modern; future prospects

Variations of Tongue Coating Microbiota in Patients with Gastric Cancer

The physical status of humans can be estimated by observing the appearance of the tongue coating, known as tongue diagnosis. The goals of this study were to reveal the relationship between tongue coating appearance and the oral microbiota in patients with gastric cancer and to open a novel research direction supporting tongue diagnosis. We used a tongue manifestation acquisition instrument to analyse the thickness of the tongue coating of patients with gastric cancer and that of healthy controls, and high-throughput sequencing was used to describe the microbial community of the tongue coating by sequencing the V2–V4 region of the 16S rDNA. The tongue coatings of 74 patients with gastric cancer were significantly thicker than those of 72 healthy controls (343.11 ± 198.22 versus 98.42 ± 48.25,P<0.001); 51.35% of the patients were assessed as having thick tongue coatings, whereas all healthy controls were assessed as having thin tongue coatings. Thick tongue coatings presented lower microbial community diversity than thin tongue coatings. The tongue coating bacterial community is associated with the appearance of the tongue coating. The tongue coating may be a potential source for diagnosing gastric cancer, but its sensitivity needs to be further improved.