Influence of the production process, storage conditions and physical and chemical properties on the stability of standardized dried extracts of medicinal plants

Author(s)

Rubiana Ferreira Bott

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Ribeirão Preto.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Ciências Farmacêuticas de Ribeirão Preto (PCARP/BC)
• Defense date: 2008-04-04

Examining board members

Wanderley Pereira de Oliveira; Maria Jose Vieira Fonseca; Renata Fonseca Vianna Lopez; Marcos José Salvador; Paulo Jose do Amaral Sobral

• Advisor: Wanderley Pereira de Oliveira

Abstract

Nowadays, the global interest for herbal drugs has increased significantly. Herbal medicinal products are a complex mixture of substances and their efficacy might be associated with one or more compounds. For this reason, the quality control of herbal products is a challenging task. In spite of a great increase in researches concerning the pharmacological and toxicological aspects of herbal drugs, there is a lack of scientific works related to the quality maintenance of these products. Among all the herbal medicinal products the standardized dried extracts are gaining more interest as a way of controlling dosage and increasing safety of the phytopharmaceuticals. Herbal dried extracts are effective due to the presence of active substances, and these substances may degrade. The rate of degradation can be measured through stability testing what is done through the storage of the product in different storage conditions (temperature and relative humidity). For this reason, the aim of this thesis was the study of the influence of the obtainment process, storage conditions and physical and chemical properties in the standardized dried extracts stability. For the understanding of the factors which affects the stability of the natural products, the extracts were characterized in relation to their composition (reducing sugars, proteins, lipids, low and high molecular weight carbohydrates, and titrable acidity), the calorimetric profile, determination of sorption isotherms, near infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis. Furthermore, the dried extracts were stored in a climatic chamber for the evaluation of the physical and chemical properties variations in relation to the time and storage conditions. Herbal dried extracts obtained from three plant species commonly used in Brazil were used in this study: Bauhinia forficata (hypoglycemiant), Maytenus ilicifolia (antiulcerogenic) and Passiflora alata (sedative and anxiolytic). The dried extracts were produced trough two different drying processes the spray drying and the spouted bed drying. In conclusion, the results obtained showed that all the studied extracts presented some deviation of the initial standards owing to its great sensibility to the environmental conditions. However, it was not possible to show how this lost would affect the effectiveness of these products. Moreover, for being such a complex mixture of components it is almost impossible the establishment of techniques that will assure that all this components will remain unchanged during the storage period. Nevertheless, some important factors for the pharmacological activity of substances as the crystallization (X-ray diffraction) or the degradation of the chemical markers (high performance liquid chromatography and spectrophotometry) can be evaluate and previewed (AU)