A Concise Review on Quality Control of Herbal Medicines

Quality control of botanical products, including herbal raw materials, herbal extracts and herbal medicines, remains a challenge. Traditional qualitative (eg. identification and chromatographic profiles) Most plant materials, plant extracts, and medicinal herbs cannot be guaranteed for quality based solely on the content or presence/absence of a single (sometimes randomly selected) compound. In this regard, sample-centric approaches have been extensively explored by introducing the use of multivariate data analysis in chromatography/spectroscopy studies. Herbal medicine, especially those from traditional Chinese or Indian medicine, is becoming increasingly popular in Europe and America. Their use is often based on long-term historical use rather than scientific evidence. Therefore, analytical tools to ensure efficiency, safety and consistency are in high demand. This review assesses the importance of the EC for quality control of herbal medicines over the past five years. Since the area ratios of the two characteristic peaks are almost identical, even though the areas are different for the same plant, the present article provides an additional method for discriminating herbal medicines. PCA groups herbal drugs into different groups, which clearly show that this method can adequately discriminate different herbal drugs using FTIR data. The levels of toxic heavy metals (Cd, Pb, Cr and As) were measured and the results were compared with the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended upper daily limit for heavy metals