We examined the association of 9 types of the Constitution in Chinese Medicine and body mass index (BMI) and/or the energy intake, which are considered to relate with lifestyle diseases. We obtained data on the Constitution in Chinese Medicine Questionnaire, height, weight, a Food Frequency Questionnaire, age, and exercise habits from 729 subjects through the Internet. We performed multiple comparison tests on the BMIs, the energy intake or the adjusted energy intake for age, height, weight, and exercise habits between types of the Constitution in Chinese Medicine. In women, the BMIs were not significantly different between personality types of the Constitution in Chinese Medicine. In men, the BMI of the yang-deficiency group was significantly lower than the ones of the gentleness, qi-deficiency, or phlegm-dampness groups (p = 0.0098, 0.029, or 0.040, respectively). No significant relationship was found between energy intake or adjusted energy intake and types of the Constitution in Chinese Medicine in men or women. Further studies are required to determine whether the Constitution in Chinese Medicine are useful for reducing risk factors for lifestyle diseases.

In this study, we proposed an approach to interpret the classification of body constitution based on the Japanese Version of Constitution in Chinese Medicine Questionnaire (CCMQ-J) in terms of an augmented questionnaire combining seven independent questionnaires. The augmented questionnaire consists of 254 questions in terms of seven categories of attributes, which are the (i) basic information (BI), (ii) disease (DI), (iii) social factors (SO), (iv) mental factors (ME), (v) dietary habits (DH), (vi) sleeping state (SL), and (vii) sub-health (SH). The partial least square (PLS) regression has been adopted to model the correlations between the scores of body constitutions and the questions, and their results show that the body constitution can be represented by the linear combination of the questions substantially (correlation coefficients between the true and predicted constitutions are all above 0.7). Moreover, by using the crowdsourcing technique in data collection, a total of 851 samples (350 males and 501 females between 20 and 85 years old) samples with diverse geographical backgrounds in Japan have been collected, from which new medical implications have been extracted through the discussion in a Traditional Chinese Medicine standpoint. This study serves as a crucial step for validating the philosophy of ancient Chinese medicine by the state-of-the-art information science techniques and facilitating the use of the CCMQ-J in public healthcare.

Chinese Medicine Questionnaire (CCMQ-J) consists of sixty independent questionnaires and 9 physical constitutions called subscales. One type is balanced constitution (i.e., gentleness), and the following eight types represent unbalanced constitution: Qi-deficiency constitution, Yang-deficiency constitution, Yin-deficiency constitution, Phlegm-dampness constitution, Damp-heat constitution, Stagnant Blood constitution, Stagnant Qi constitution, and Inherited Special constitution. In this study, we proposed to determine optimal number of groups in 851 participants recruited from crowdsourcing answered CCMQ-J questionnaire consisting of 60 questions. In the present study, we applied k-means clustering with gap statistics to the questionnaire data and the number of optimal groups was estimated by five. The five groups are mainly characterized by 3 subscales in CCMQ-J, i.e. (i) two subscales corresponding to Yang-deficiency and Qi-depress, (ii) three subscales corresponding to gentleness, Yang-deficiency and Qi-depress (iii) Yang-deficiency, (iv) gentleness, and (v) Qi-depress. In the crowdsourcing survey, two subscales, Yang-deficient and Qi-depress are the most frequently occurred in current Japanese people.