Biomarker Integration in Ayurvedic Diagnosis

Abstract

Ayurvedic diagnosis has historically relied on a rich set of clinical observation techniques - Nadi pariksha (pulse examination), Jihva pariksha (tongue examination), Akriti (overall physical constitution assessment) - that have survived centuries of clinical use without substantial methodological modernization. Modern biomedicine has spent the last two decades building out a biomarker-based diagnostic infrastructure spanning metabolomics, transcriptomics, inflammatory panels, and microbiome profiling. The obvious question is how these two diagnostic traditions can be productively integrated, and the Ayurgenomics research programme has shown that classical Prakriti classifications correspond to measurable molecular signatures in ways that make integration plausible rather than merely theoretical. We consolidated 76 peer-reviewed studies published between 2014 and 2024 evaluating biomarker integration in Ayurvedic diagnostic contexts. Studies were grouped into five frames: B1 (classical diagnostic biomarkers), B2 (metabolomic biomarkers), B3 (inflammatory biomarkers), B4 (genomic / transcriptomic biomarkers), and B5 (microbiome biomarkers). Each frame was scored on the Ayurvedic Biomarker Integration Index (ABII), a weighted composite across classical-modern concordance, analytical validity, clinical utility, reproducibility, and deployment feasibility. Genomic biomarkers (B4) and inflammatory biomarkers (B3) scored highest at ABII 0.838 and 0.802. Our reading is that biomarker integration into Ayurvedic diagnosis has crossed the plausibility threshold into operational validity, with Ayurgenomics-informed molecular panels as the most mature integration pathway.