In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called TD-FP-Growth (the shorthand for Top-Down FP-Growth), to mine frequent patterns. TD-FP-Growth searches the FP-tree in the top-down order, as opposed to the bottom-up order of previously proposed FP-Growth. The advantage of the top-down search is not generating conditional pattern bases and sub-FP-trees, thus, saving substantial amount of time and space. We extend TD-FP-Growth to mine association rules by applying two new pruning strategies: one is to push multiple minimum supports and the other is to push the minimum confidence. Experiments show that these algorithms and strategies are highly effective in reducing the search space.