Quality assurance and safety of herbal dietary supplements.

Since the U.S. Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) in 1994, use of herbal products has been growing rapidly worldwide. To ensure consumer health protection, the quality and safety of herbal plants, particularly those used for dietary supplement preparations, must be determined. To date, toxicological data on the identification of genotoxic and tumorigenic ingredients in many raw herbs and their mechanisms of action are lacking. Thus, identification of carcinogenic components in herbal plants is timely and important. In this review, the issues of quality control and safety evaluation of raw herbs and herbal dietary supplements are discussed. Two examples of tumorigenicity and mechanism of tumor induction are discussed: aristolochic acid and riddelliine, both of which have been detected in Chinese herbal plants. It is proposed that an organized effort with international participation on cancer risk assessment should be actively pursued so that the safety of commercial herbal plants and herbal dietary supplements can be ensured.

[Analysis of Indicators Related with Cell Proliferation and Apoptosis in the Patients with B Cell Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma].

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the indicators related with cell proliferation and apoptosis in patients with B cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma(B-NHL). METHODS: Seventy-two cases of B-NHL and 50 cases of reactive hyperplasia of lymph nodes were entrolled in the experimental group and control group respectively. The expression levels of proliferating cell nuclear antigen(PCNA), X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis(XIAP) and B cell lymphoma leukemia-2(BCL-2) in paraffin-embedded tissue samples of 2 groups were detected by immuno-histochemistry staining, and their ralationship with pathologic factors was analyzed. RESULTS: The positive cell rates of PCNA, XIAP and BCL-2 in experiment group were significantly higher than those in control group (P<0.05); the positive cell rate of PCNA in B-NHL patients at III-IV stage was higher than that in B-NHL patients at I-II stage(P<0.05), however, the positive cell rates of XIAP and BCL-2 in B-NHL patients with different pathologic factors were not significantly different(P>0.05). The progression-free survival(PES) time in PCNA low positive expression group was longer than that in PCNA high positive expression group(P<0.05), but the PFS time between B-NHL patients with XIAP positive and negative expression was not significantly different(P>0.05); the PFS time also was not significantly different between B-NHL patients with BCL-2 positive and negative expression(P>0.05). CONCLUSION: All the PCNA, XIAP and BCL-2 participate in the pathngenesis of B-NHL, among them the positive level of PCNA obviously influences the clinical staging of B-NHL.