National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) is an important part of national system for innovation, which provides financial assistance mainly for the basic and applied researches of natural sciences, especially for the researchers who work in the learning institutions and the agencies of scientific research with advanced facilities. This paper summarized the applications and approved projects on traditional Chinese medicine in NFSC in 2005. We initially analyzed the growth, quality, characteristics, tendency and problems of these items.

From 2000 to 2004, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) accepted 1 171 applications and funded 160 projects for fundamental research on integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine. The success rate is 13.64%. Being supported by NSFC, a number of achievements well known in China and abroad have been made, such as acupuncture complementary anaesthesia, treatment of leukemia, viral hepatitis, cardio-cerebrovascular diseases, acute abdomen, burns and fracture with integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine and their therapeutic mechanisms, and some new concepts and theories have been put forward, such as the theories of activating blood to resolve stagnation, simultaneous treatment of bacteria and toxin, etc. But there still exit some problems in the research of the funded projects. The research ways are mainly combination of different methods instead of integration of both traditional Chinese and Western medicine. The research results are mainly confirmation of traditional Chinese medical theories instead of exploration of their innate regularities. The relationship among disease, syndrome and symptom is not clearly explored. The principal-subordinate relationship between macro- and micro-differentiation of syndromes is not clear. Academic research is short of new ideas. Improper or biased explanation of the theories of traditional Chinese medicine still exists. On analysis of above problems, some preferable aspects of projects for fundamental research on integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine funded by NSFC in future are suggested in this article.

Objective To investigate the correlation between depression, anxiety and sleep disturbance. Methods 93 patients with the main complaint of insomnia were selected and performed a retrospective study. Results Four factors including anxiety factors, manifest anxiety, subjective depression and dominant depression of the insomnia patients were significantly higher than normal people, while the Ego Strength scores are significantly lower than the normal people. Conclusion When confronting patients with sleep disturbance, doctors must pay attention to identifying any psychological disorders including depression and anxiety in the patients, and psychological support should also be strengthened to such patients.

In this article, the authors firstly summarized the number of applications submitted to and projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in the field of traditional Chinese medicine research in 2010. Then they described the district distribution, research direction layout and allotment of the approved projects in the three primary disciplines (traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese materia medica and integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine) and their 43 subdisciplines. The targeting suggestions for improvement were given respectively by concluding the reason of disapproved projects from the point of view of applicants and supporting institution, and by stating the common problems existing in the review process from the perspectives of fund managers and evaluation experts. Lastly, the major funding fields in the near future were predicted in the hope of providing guidance for applicants.