• Jiajing Chen, Jiyong Yang, Yuenong Qin, Chenping Sun, Jiatuo Xu, Xiqiu Zhou, Chunyu Wu, Yiyun Xu, and Sheng Liu.
• Department of Breast Surgery (Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine), Longhua Hospital affiliated to Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2022 Nov 18; 101 (46): e31327e31327.

AbstractTraditional Chinese tongue diagnosis plays an irreplaceable role in disease diagnosis. This study aimed to describe the tongue characteristics of patients with granulomatous lobular mastitis (GLM). Forty GLM patients and 40 non-GLM controls were evaluated using the Traditional Chinese Medicine subjective clinical interpretation and a TDA-1 Tongue Diagnostic and Analysis system. The associations between the image features of the tongue body and coating and the profiling of immune-inflammatory parameters were analyzed. GLM patients were prone to a reddish tongue bodies with thick, white, and greasy coatings. Thick and greasy tongue coating features are risk factors for GLM. GLM patients had higher levels of white blood cells (WBC), platelets, C-reactive protein, interleukin-2, and transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) than non-GLM controls (P < .05). Also, tongue coating contrast and entropy values were significantly correlated with WBC or TGF-β levels in GLM patients (r < -0.310 and P < .05). We demonstrated that the hot evil and phlegm-dampness constitutions are the main characteristics of GLM. This might provide a reference for GLM diagnosis.Copyright © 2022 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.

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