Determination of Metallic Elements for Quality Control of Herbal Medicines

Abstract

Herbal medicines contain multiple compounds, each of which may be relevant to the medicine's putative activity. Therefore, fingerprint techniques that look at a suite of compounds, including their respective ratios, provide a more powerful approach to the quality control of herbal medicines. A new method called spectroscopic fingerprint, which is accurate and rapid, was proposed in this paper. Some typical examples of herbal medicines were presented. Fifteen metallic elements in sixteen herbal medicines samples were measured by induced coupled plasmaatomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES). The data analysis was performed with the softwares MATLAB and EXCEL. The experimental results clearly demonstrated that the proposed method was a useful tool to control the quality of herbal medicines.