STANDARDIZATION OF HERBAL DRUGS ? A REVIEW

In the past few decades, the utilization of herbal drugs has been increased all over the world due their enormous therapeutic effects and less adverse effects as compared to the synthetic drugs. The emergent use of herbal drug by the human is forcing moves to evaluate the health claims of these agents and to develop standards of quality, purity, safety and efficacy of the drug. The mostly herbal drugs are effective but they lack of standardization. So there is a need to develop standardization parameters. Standardization of herbal drug is necessary to confirm its identity and to determine its quality, purity, safety, content, physical, chemical and biological properties. But the most important challenges faced by these herbal drugs are the lack of complete standardization by physiochemical. The standardization of the herbal drug, the macroscopic characters, microscopic characters, physic-chemical properties, moisture content, ash values, extractive values, volatile oil content and fluorescence study were carried out. Chromatography study, heavy metal content, microbial contamination and pesticide residues were also carried out to assure the quality, purity and safety of the herbal drugs.