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.