Quality Control Method for Herbal Medicine - Chemical Fingerprint Analysis

The herbal medicines (HMs) and their preparations have been widely used for thousands of years in many oriental countries, such as China, Korea, Japan, etc, (Liang Y.-Z. et al.,2004) and it is attracting more and more attention from all over the world. But the uncontrollable quality of HMs is the obstacle for internationalization and modernization. For HMs, both single and combinations contain a myriad of compounds, and multiple constituents of HMs represent their therapeutic effects. Moreover, the chemical constituents in herbs in the HM products may be diverse due to various harvest seasons, plant origins, origins, processing and other factors (Liang Y.-Z. et al.,2004).As to one kind of herbal medicine, any difference from above aspects can lead to variant efficacy. This point was illustrated in many literatures. (Pan Ruijing, et al., 2011;Qiu YQ, et al.,2007;Zeng Y.-X., et al., 2007;Zhang YY, et al., 2008) The content of bioactive components in the roots of Salvia miltiorrhizae (danshen) was closely related to germplasm and harvest time (He Chun’e, et al., 2010).As for HMs, the specific quality control of the tested samples usually was achieved through the identification and determination. Because of uncertainty and complexity, there is great difficulty in establishing a specific method of quality control of HMs. The techniques of authentication are not powerful enough to identify all the ingredients in a HM, target setting is too general to determine the active ingredient and the components that are regarded as markers are often not active. Hereby there are some problems in developing specific and objective quality standards of herb medicines. And just on based of this point, adulteration or inferior quality drugs appeared more and more in markets. Subsequent evaluation revealed some products to be adulterated with other related plants from the same genus(Ma C.-H.,2011), for instance, in the U.S. market black cohosh products are adulterated widely with other species of Actaea, which are lower-priced and exert unknown effect on menopausal symptoms (Jiang B.,et al.,2006). At the same time also a large number of substitutes enjoy the same name but have different ingredients and efficiency, which causes confusion medicinal species and affects the safety and efficacy of HMs. In order to eliminate these quality problems, on one hand we must actively foster the concept of pharmaceutical production of good quality and the concept of legal system, and on the other hand, the scientific and technologically advanced quality control standards should be established as soon as possible.