Quality evaluation of commercial herbal products using chemical methods

Abstract

Herbal products comprise a wide spectrum of locally, nationally or internationally commercialized commodities. As these products have an increasingly important position in healthcare systems worldwide, a detailed product quality assessment is of crucial importance. For the quality evaluation of commercial herbal products, a wide range of methods were used, from simpler, quicker, and cost-effective HPTLC, to hyphenated methods with MS or NMR, where more precise quantification or specific structural information is required. Additionally, most of the methods have been coupled with chemometric tools, such as PCA, or PDA, for the multivariate analysis of the high amount of data generated by chromatograms, electropherograms or spectra. The chemical methods have revealed the widespread presence of low or variable quality herbal products in the marketplace. The majority of analytical investigations present major, qualitative and quantitative, inter-product variations of their chemical composition, ranging from missing ingredients, to strikingly and unnaturally high concentrations of some compounds. Moreover, the inter-batch quality variations were frequently reported, as well as the presence of some undesirable substances. The chemical analysis of herbal products is a vital component to raise the overall awareness of quality in the herbal market and generate a quality driven approach.

Keywords:

• Chemical composition
• food supplement
• herbal medicine
• phytochemicals
• quality control
• food safety

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was supported by the National Core Program funded by the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, project number 25N/11.02.2019, BIODIVERS 19270401. This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization through Program 1—Development of the National R&D System, Subprogram 1.2—Institutional Performance—Projects for Excellence Financing in RDI, contract no. 2PFE/2021.