Ancient terms of chronic renal failure: The key to ancient literature mining

In order to explore the ancient terms of chronic renal failure, we collected the ancient terms of chronic renal failure from modern literature retrieval, prominent TCM doctors' experience and monographs and textbooks and then designed a questionnaire based on the candidate ancient terms to conduct an expert consultation among experts of academic and medicine community in nephropathy department in tertiary general hospitals of Chinese medicine around China. A total of thirty-three ancient terms related to chronic renal failure were derived. And only twenty-five ancient terms were selected in the consultation questionnaire after standardization. Forty experts were invited in our study and thirty-seven experts (response rate of 92.5%) completed the questionnaire. They are come from 19 out of 34 provinces in China. After calculation, the top six ancient terms with highest consistency according to average score were "Ni Du", "Shui Zhong", "Guan Ge", "Xu Lao", "Shen Lao", "Long Bi". The results were consistent with the frequencies in modern literature retrieval, prominent TCM doctors' experience, and monographs and textbooks. In conclusion, "Ni Du", "Guan Ge", "Shui Zhong", "Xu Lao", "Shen Lao", "Long Bi" could be recommended as the ancient terms of CRF in the further study of ancient literature mining.