Assessment of heavy metal ions, essential metal ions, and antioxidant properties of the most common herbal drugs in Indian Ayurvedic hospital: For ensuring quality assurance of certain Ayurvedic drugs

Abstract During the last few years, World Health Organisation (WHO) has emphasized for the quality control for herbal drugs. The present study was designed and executed to check the heavy metal ions content in the most commonly used Ayurvedic/herbal drugs in Indian Ayurvedic hospitals. Based upon the medicinal applications, we have examined 23 most common and important drug sample contained 7 vati, 5 guggulu, 7 churna, and 4 lauha samples. Essential metal ions, antioxidant and protein binding qualities of drug samples under study were analyzed. Metal ions (heavy metal and essential metal ions) were determined by using the Inductive Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The antioxidant potential was evaluated through spectrophotometric analysis by using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH), metal chelating (MC), ferric reducing (FRAP), Scavenging activity of superoxide anion (SA) and nitric oxide (NO) assays. The observed total phenolic content of the samples varied from 14.91 to 208.34 mg gallic acid equivalent (GAE)/g dry weight (DW) of sample(s). The values of total flavanoids content were varied from 48.0 to 208.0 mg quercetin equivalent (QE)/g DW of sample(s). As, compared to control (ascorbic acid), herbal drug samples have shown excellent antioxidant activities over a range from 40.51 to 92.34%. The observed protein binding constants values were almost close to control (aspirin). It was noticed that maximum drugs have a good source of essential metal ions like Na, Mg, Ca, Fe, Cu, Zn etc. The observed concentration values for the heavy metal ions were within the prescribed limits of WHO and API. Only two drugs contained aluminium concentrations more than 50 mg/kg. These findings may validate and boost up the quality control process.