Novel approaches for stability improvement in natural medicines

Abstract

Natural product market has seen tremendous growth in the last few years. It results in the formulation of a number of proprietary herbal products, majority of them being multi-component formulations. With the advancement of herbal drug treatments, it has now been observed that many of the constituents present in the drug may react with each other, raising the serious concern about the stability of such formulations which is an important issue in the field of phytochemistry and natural medicines. Natural products are often prone to deterioration, especially during storage, leading to loss of active component, production of metabolites with no activity and, in extreme cases, production of toxic metabolites. This area needs to be addressed in order to determine the efficacy of the formulation. Understanding the problems related to natural product stability can give the idea of dealing with the stability issues. Modifications of the conventional herbal formulations can deal with the stability problems to a large extent. This article deals with the stability problems and is aimed to provide some tools and techniques to increase stability of natural medicines and herbal formulations.

Home | Articles ViewEditOutline Gel Formulation Containing Microcapsules of Grape Seed Oil (Vitis vinifera L.) for Skin Moisturizer

“…The size and spherical shape of microcapsules were depended on the speed of stirring in the medium or continue phase solution. 8 By reducing the speed, the size of the microcapsules would increase. Furthermore, the drying conditions of the microcapsules also microcapsules were not hygroscopic because ethylcellulose wasnot affected by the water, so the use of ethylcellulose as a polymer coating would be more stable if it is put in a gel formulation.…”

Preparation and characterization of herbal emulsion formulations

“…The effect of parameters such as the content of surfactant, oil, herbal extracts, HLB number of surfactant blend and additive content on emulsion stability was studied by trial and error method [9][10][11]. Formulations with selected herbal ingredients were prepared by the emulsion method to obtain o/w emulsion formulations.…”

“…In this direction, combination of above mentioned herbal ingredients together in a formulation, which is cosmetically acceptable, stable, easily prepared and applicable, will be useful for the skin disorders. In case of topical application of herbal substances, emulsions have offer formulation advantages due to their structure available as both aqueous and oily substances and being cosmetically acceptable [5][6][7][8][9][10].…”

Investigation of Stability of Korean Ginseng in Herbal Drug Product

“…People this believe that takes these formulations are among the over counter preprations that can be sold freely; however for quality control complete assessment of such preprations should be investigated covering physical, chemical, microbiological, toxicological and theraputic stability to insure evedencebased safety (Thakur et al, 2011). Accordingly this study was carried to one type of herbal product.…”