More safeguards needed for Herbal Medicinal Products: Study

The report suggests that adverse reactions are under-reported and product quality may be less than ideal. Herbs have a complex composition and there is lack of information on the toxicity of medicinal herbs or their constituents, it claims.

Safety assessment​

The report, Assessment of herbal medicinal products: Challenges, and opportunities to increase the knowledge base for safety assessment​, recommends five actions to protect the public.

The authors, Health Canada’s Scott Jordan, David Cunningham and Robin Marles, recommend:

• Educating consumers, health care practitioners and the industry about potential adverse reactions.
• Using Poison Control Centre data to augment available reports suspected to be linked to HMPs.
• Encouraging authors of scientific publications on HMP adverse reactions or toxicity information to provide more information.
• Using omics and predictive toxicology in the toxicological assessment of HMPs to provide integrated assessments.
• New active surveillance methods such as community-based surveillance by pharmacies, hospitals, retailers to detect safety signals related to HMPs.

Although the public perceives the risk from HMPs to be low, potential harm can arise from a inherent toxicity of herbs, warns the report. It also highlights dangers associated with contamination, adulteration, plant misidentification, and interactions with other herbal products or pharmaceutical drugs.

Toxicological assessment​

“One of the challenges in toxicological assessment of herbal products is determining the applicability of data on isolated phytochemicals to the “real-life” situation where whole plants or plant extracts are used​,” note the report’s authors.

No one from the Canadian public body Health Canada was available for comment before publication.