Fraud Detection of Herbal Medicines Based on Modern Analytical Technologies Combine with Chemometrics Approach: A Review

Abstract

Fraud in herbal medicines (HMs), commonplace throughout human history, is significantly related to medicinal effects with sometimes lethal consequences. Major HMs fraud events seem to occur with a certain regularity, such as substitution by counterfeits, adulteration by addition of inferior production-own materials, adulteration by chemical compounds, and adulteration by addition of foreign matter. The assessment of HMs fraud is in urgent demand to guarantee consumer protection against the four fraudulent activities. In this review, three analysis platforms (targeted, non-targeted, and the combination of non-targeted and targeted analysis) were introduced and summarized. Furthermore, the integration of analysis technology and chemometrics method (e.g., class-modeling, discrimination, and regression method) have also been discussed. Each integration shows different applicability depending on their advantages, drawbacks, and some factors, such as the explicit objective analysis or the nature of four types of HMs fraud. In an attempt to better solve four typical HMs fraud, appropriate analytical strategies are advised and illustrated with several typical studies. The article provides a general workflow of analysis methods that have been used for detection of HMs fraud. All analysis technologies and chemometrics methods applied can conduce to excellent reference value for further exploration of analysis methods in HMs fraud.

Keywords:

• Herbal medicines (HMs)
• fraud detection
• analysis technologies
• chemometrics methods

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31860584); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31760360); the major science and technology projects in Yunnan Province (Grant number: 2018ZF010).