Quality control of traditional Chinese medicines: a review

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) are in great demand all over the world, especially in the developing world, for primary health care due to their superior merits such as low cost, minimal side effects, better cultural acceptability, and compatibility with humans. However, Chinese medicines consist of several herbs which may contain tens, hundreds, or even thousands of constituents. How these constituents interact with each other, and what the special active ones are, may be the biggest bottleneck for the modernization and globalization of TCMs. Valid methods to evaluate the quality of TCMs are therefore essential and should be promoted and be developed further through advanced separation and chromatography techniques. This paper reviews the strategies used to control the quality of TCMs in a progressive perspective, from selecting single or several ingredients as the evaluation marker, to using different kinds of chromatography fingerprint methods. In summary, the analysis and quality control of TCMs are developing in a more effective and comprehensive manner to better address the inherent holistic nature of TCMs.

Lamalbid, Chlorogenic Acid, and Verbascoside as Tools for Standardization of Lamium album Flowers—Development and Validation of HPLC–DAD Method

“…In the latter case, quality specifications are usually provided in the international pharmacopoeias, which however do not include a large number of herbal products. Nowadays, this particular case is widely discussed [1,2]. Nevertheless, the tests designed for the quality control of neglected plants are still required in the developing states of Europe [1].…”

Micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography fingerprints combined with multivariate statistical analyses to evaluate the quality consistency and predict the fingerprint–efficacy relationship of Salviae miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma (Danshen)

“…In addition, their inherent quality may vary significantly according to a wide range of factors such as different geographic sources, harvesting seasons, different plant species, and processing methods . Therefore, these characteristics pose huge challenges in controlling the quality of TCM, which should be considered by the international pharmaceutical industry . So far, the quality control (QC) of TCM has mainly been performed based on the analysis of a few marker compounds; however, this approach is certainly unreliable .…”

Total monitoring of the constituents of Danshen tablet using micellar electrokinetic chromatography fingerprinting for antioxidant activity profiling

“…Although HPLC has high efficiency, it cannot adapt to rapid detection in the market for its expensive instruments, professional performance, and long time consuming, what is more, it needs complex purification steps and high consumption of organic solvents [6,7]. By contrast, CE is an economical method with many valuable advantages such as short analysis time, simple sample pretreatment, minimal solvent consumption, high peak capacity, high resolution and excellent mass sensitivity [2,4,5,[7][8][9][10][11][12]. Thus, CE has gradually become a powerful tool in separation science and achieved better separation performances in TCM [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”