NEAR INFRA-RED SPECTROSCOPY FOR QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF INDIAN TRADITIONAL HERBAL MEDICINES: A REVIEW

Herbal Medicines (HM) and their preparations have been widely used for hundreds of years all over the world. However, they have not been officially recognized due to lack of adequate or accepted research methodology for their evaluation. Traditional systems of Indian Herbal medicine include Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani and Siddha. Among them Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani systems (ASU) use plants, minerals and animal products as main drugs to cure various ailments. The quality and safety of these herbal products has now become a serious issue due to increasing pollution in air, water, soil, etc. Pharmacognostical analysis of medicinal herbs remains challenging issues for analytical chemists, as herbs are a complicated system of mixtures.  This review emphasizes the significance of NIR methods in the discrimination of much herbal medicine from closely related species and from adulterants. The quality of samples from different localities and growing conditions based on their geographical origin may vary. Thus, the identification of crude herbs based on geographical origins is crucial in order to ensure authenticity, quality, safety and efficacy of the raw material before it is converted to the final product. Herbal product manufacturer always seeking for a faster and cost effective verification method since the traditional wet chemistry analysis are too laborious and time consuming. Discrimination according to geographical origin and localities, processing methods, DNA profiling and metabolomics were efficiently investigated. This paper will discuss about the various common and sophisticated techniques used for quality assessment of Indian traditional herbal medicine.