Consumption situation of Chinese medicine in Shanghai: a cross-sectional study

Abstract Background This cross-sectional study aimed to construct a database of Chinese medicine consumption, including the annual intake, the number of days of intake, and the daily intake of Chinese medicine, which is helpful for risk assessment and understanding of consumer trends.Methods About 40 million rows of data used in this study were derived from the hospitals in Shanghai, which contains the prescription number, the name of consumers, the date of the dispensing, the name of Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCMs), dosage, and the number of days taken. All data were stored in a MySQL database. R language was used as the main tool for statistical analysis and graphical work.Results The result shows the annual consumption, annual consumption days, and average daily consumption of 20 types of common TCMs and all TCMs consumed. The result shows Astragali radix, Coicis semen, and Danshen are the top three of consumption among the selected Chinese medicines. An easy-to-use software called the Chinese medicine consumption database (CMCD) was designed to search and download consumption data. It is built using the Shiny package in the R, is free to access on any device with an internet browser, and requires no programming knowledge to be used.Conclusions A Chinese medicine consumption database was constructed, which included the consumption situation of 20 types of common TCMs and all TCMs consumed. This database plays a pivotal role in the risk assessment of the pollutants in TCMs and the prediction of the consumption trend of TCMs.