Current trends in standardization of herbal formulations

Abstract

Herbal medicines are not a simple task since many factors influence the biological efficacy and reproducible therapeutic effect. Standardized herbal products of consistent quality and containing well-defined constituents are required for reliable clinical trials and to provide consistent beneficial ther-apeutic effects. Pharmacological properties of an herbal formulation depend on phytochemical constituents present therein. Many cutting-edge analyti-cal technologies have been introduced to evaluate the quality of medicinal plants and significant amount of measurement data has been produced. De-velopment of authentic analytical methods, which can reliably profile the phytochemical composition, including quantitative analyses of mar-ket/bioactive compounds and other major constituents, is a major challenge to scientists. In view of the growing interest in herbal medicines, methods for standardization of herbal drugs are developed and used in different for-mulation.