BACKGROUND The use of herbal medicines for health prevention and ailments is an increasing trend worldwide. Women in pregnancy are no exception; the reported prevalence of herbal medicine use in pregnancy ranges from 1 to 60 %. Despite a common perception of safety, herbal medicines may have potent pharmacological actions, and historically, have been used for this reason. METHODS A multinatio...

On 31 May/1 June and on 21/22 July 2005, the Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products (HMPC), which was founded in September 2004, met for the 5th and the 6th time, respectively, at the offices of the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA). A number of guidance documents has been elaborated by the Committee’s drafting groups on organisational matters, on quality and on sa...

Herbal based medicines are used for the treatment of many diseases from ancient times while pharmaceutical chemistry is recently developed. Usually Herbal medicines have been delivered orally in both animals and human. Targeted drug-delivery systems currently more common for the treatment of most life threatening diseases such as cancers. In addition to drug eluting devices many nano based devi...

Cognitive models and intelligent agents are becoming more complex and pervasive. It is time again to consider high-level behavior representation languages and development environments that make it easier to create, share, and reuse cognitive models. One of these languages is Herbal, a high-level behavior representation language. Users represent knowledge in Protégé, an ontology editor. Herbal c...

Numerous studies have indicated that in cancer treatment Chinese herbal medicines in combination with chemo- or radio-therapy can be used to enhance the efficacy of and diminish the side effects and complications caused by chemo- and radio-therapy. Therefore, an understanding of Chinese herbal medicines is needed by physicians and other health care providers. This review provides evidence for u...

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a major health threat worldwide. The literature on herbal intervention in AKI was searched from English and Chinese databases and reports were critically analyzed in terms of preventing AKI, promoting repair and regeneration, enhancing extrarenal clearance of uremic toxins, and preventing progression to chronic kidney disease (CKD). Altogether, 16 herbal formulae an...

Herbal drug authentication is an important task in traditional medicine; however, it is challenged by the limitations of traditional authentication methods and the lack of trained experts. DNA barcoding is conspicuous in almost all areas of the biological sciences and has already been added to the British pharmacopeia and Chinese pharmacopeia for routine herbal drug authentication. However, DNA...

Inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) is a major cause of herb-drug interactions. The CYP1A2 enzyme plays a major role in the metabolism of drugs in humans. Its broad substrate specificity, as well as its inhibition by a vast array of structurally diverse herbal active ingredients, has indicated the possibility of metabolic herb-drug interactions. Therefore nowadays searching inhibitors for CYP1A...

Recently, the use of herbal medicines has been increased all over the world due to their therapeutic effects and fewer adverse effects as compared to the modern medicines. However, many herbal drugs and herbal extracts despite of their impressive in-vitro findings demonstrates less or negligible in-vivo activity due to their poor lipid solubility or improper molecular size, resulting in poor ab...

Herbal medicines involve the integration of several therapeutic experiences and practices of indigenous systems of medicine that may span many previous generations, which often provides valuable guidelines to the selection, preparation and application of herbal formulation for the treatment, control and management of variety of ailments. According to World Health Organization, 60% of the world’...