Necessity to standardization of extract of medicinal plants in the investigations and manner to do it

Over 80% of the world population depends on herbal medicines and products for healthy living, and also, around 80% of all pharmaceutical materials are derived directly or indirectly from plant sources. So, there is increasing general acceptability of the use of medicinal plants in today’s medical sciences researches. Plants are valuable for modern medicine in four basic ways; they are used as a source of direct therapeutic agents, as a raw material for semi synthetic chemical compounds, as models for new synthetic compounds and finally medicinal plants can be used as taxonomic markers for the discovery of new compounds.
Herbal extracts are not a simple task since many factors influence the biological efficacy and reproducible results. Standardized herbal extracts of consistent quality and containing well-defined constituents are required to provide reliable and consistent clinical effects. Herbal drug technology is used for converting botanicals materials into medicines, where standardization and quality control with proper integration of modern scientific techniques and traditional knowledge is important.
Quality control and standardization of herbal medicines involve several steps. The source and quality of raw materials play essential role in guaranteeing the quality and stability of herbal preparations.
Standardization is a process of evaluating the quality and purity of medicinal plants and their extracts by various parameters like morphological, microscopical, physical, chemical and biological specifications.
The researches, however, suffer from lack of standardization parameters and proper documentation based on scientific screening procedures.
In this present study, an attempt has been made to give an overview of necessity of standardization of extract of medicinal plants in the investigations and the manner to perform it.
Keywords: Standardization, Quality control, Herbal extracts, Medicinal plants, Evaluation of extracts