100 years ago, we don’t understand electricity, so we think of the electric eel as an amazing fish. With understanding the electricity, we learn that the power of the eel is produced by muscle discharge. Similarly, if we don’t un-derstand sound, we would not know the magic of bat flying; if we don’t un-derstand magnetic field, we would not know the migration of whale and many other animal.
Before the system theory came into being, our understanding of biology is still based on the basis of decomposition and reduction. If we’re stuck in reductionism, many complex autoimmune diseases, such as Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), will be difficult to understand. With the emergence of com-plex networks in 1989, understanding of biological networks has been en-hanced. In this book we present the management strategy of RA from the perspective of complex network.
RA is the most common chronic autoimmune joint disease. This book argues that the RA is firstly caused by chronic stress and stress factors in-clude physical and psychological stress. Existing statistical techniques based on reductionism cannot discover many relevant disease risk factors and complex interaction relationship. The disease network model based on complex network is important for the analysis and treatment of RA disease.