Holistic evaluation of San-Huang Tablets using a combination of multi-wavelength quantitative fingerprinting and radical-scavenging assays

The present study was designed to establish a multi-wavelength quantitative fingerprinting method for San-Huang Tablets (SHT), a widely used and commercially available herbal preparation, where high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with a diode array detector (DAD) was employed to obtain the fingerprint profiles. A simple linear quantitative fingerprint method (SLQFM) coupled with multi-ingredient simultaneous determination was developed to evaluate the quality consistency of the tested samples qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, the component-activity relationship between chromatographic fingerprints and total radical-scavenging capacity in vitro (as assessed using the 1, 1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assay) was investigated by partial least squares regression (PLSR) analysis to predict the antioxidant capacity of new samples from the chromatographic fingerprints and identify the main active constituents that can be used as the target markers for the quality control of SHT. In conclusion, the strategy developed in the present study was effective and reliable, which can be employed for holistic evaluation and accurate discrimination for the quality consistency of SHT preparations and other traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and herbal preparations as well.