The relationship between the drug effect and the time interval from operation or onset of hepatitis or hepatic damage to the beginning of the administration of Chinese herb medicines allowed us to postulate the usual clinical course of the disease as follows from the viewpoint of traditional Chinese medicine: namely two months after surgery or onset of the disease being the Yang stage, the four months after the Yang stage being the Yang-Yin transitional stage and after this being the Yin stage. The Yin stage was further divided into earlier and later periods, the border line being five years after the operation or onset of the disease.
In the Yang stage the drug effect was mostly excellent, and the medicines used were mainly for Qi-fen and Re-zheng, as well as the medicines used in the Yang-Yin transitional stage when healing of the excellent cases and increase of the cases with good effect were characteristic. In the earlier Yin stage the cases with no effect began to increase, and the medicines used ranged from Qi-fen to Ying-fen . In the later Yin stage the cases with excellent effect disappeared, and the cases with good or no effect were dominant. In this stage the medicines for Xue-fen were sometimes added to the medicines for Qi-fen or Ying-fen, and relative increase of the medicines for Xu-han-zheng was noticed.

Abdominal aortic aneurysm and cystic kidneys are both common diseases that have been increasingly detected due to the development of medical screening instruments, such as computed tomography and ultrasonography. We occasionally intraoperatively encounter abdominal aortic aneurysms accompanying cystic renal lesions. However, there have been extremely few reports about abdominal aortic aneurysms complicated by cystic renal disease. Large renal cysts or polycystic kidneys are at risk of rupture or intraoperative hemorrhage, and can hinder the surgical treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysm. Therefore, there is a significant need for surgeons to be able to preoperatively determine the potential of an interruption of the procedure, for example, due to a cystic lesion. In this paper, we report a case of a 77-year-old man with abdominal aortic aneurysm who complained of abdominal fullness due to the presence of large cystic lesions in both kidneys. Preoperatively we aspirated 1, 550ml percutaneously from bilateral renal cysts under ultrasonographic guidance, but did not instill sclerosing agents, such as ethanol. Three days after the percutaneous aspiration, surgical treatment of the abdominal aortic aneurysm (5.2cm in diameter), the left common iliac arterial aneurysm and the right common iliac arterial aneurysm (3.0 and 2.6cm in diameter) was performed through a median abdominal incision with a retroperitoneal approach. The arterial prosthesis used was a Y-shaped woven double velour vascular graft. The postoperative course was uneventful and the patient was discharged 14 days after the vascular reconstruction procedure. Our experience suggests that percutaneous aspiration of large renal cysts that might hinder the surgical procedure for abdominal aortic aneurysm is useful.