Medicinal plants in the treatment of women's disorders: Analytical strategies to assure quality, safety and efficacy.

During last decades an increasing number of herbal products specifically targeting women's disorders has appeared in the worldwide marketplace. This growth highlights the need for a critical evaluation of quality, safety and efficacy of these products. Analytical techniques applied to the quality control of the main medicinal plants used for women health (relief of menopause and menstrual related symptoms) have been reviewed. Thanks to the innovation in analytical technology, identification and detection of secondary metabolites dramatically improved. In particular, hyphenated techniques have proved to be the most suitable for the rapid identification of compounds in plant matrix. Moreover, taking into account that differences in sample quality are not only found in the main compounds or in the chemical markers but also in the low-concentration compounds, fingerprint analysis might be a simple way for identification and quality control of herbal products containing a large number of low amounts of unknown compounds. Furthermore in several papers the informations obtained from the analysis of a plant have been processed by statistical elaborations. Medicinal plants here discussed are classified on the basis of the chemical markers used for their quality control.