Radix Rehmanniae, Fructus Schisandrae, Radix Bupleuri, and Fructus Gardeniae are often used alongside with clozapine (CLZ) for schizophrenia patients in order to reduce side effects and enhance therapeutic efficacy. However, worse outcomes were observed raising concern about a critical issue, herb-drug interactions, which were rarely reported when antipsychotics were included. This study aims t...

The safety profile of a drug, including adverse reactions and drug interactions, is not static and varies according to the use patterns of different patients. Drug interaction occurs not only between drugs (i.e. drug-drug interactions) but also between the drug and foods, herbs, supplements and other complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs). Thanks to the ease of Internet shopping, there ...

Increasing and inadvertent use of herbs makes herb-drug interactions a focus of research. Concomitant use of warfarin, a highly efficacious oral anticoagulant, and herbs causes major safety concerns due to the narrow therapeutic window of warfarin. This paper presents an update overview of clinical findings regarding herb-warfarin interaction, highlighting clinical outcomes, severity of documen...

The popular use of herbal products in the general community raises concerns for potential herb– drug interactions. The risk of herb–drug interactions is increased if the herbal medicines are used concurrently with drugs which have a narrow therapeutic range, or are used in certain groups of patients, such as the elderly or those with impaired liver and renal functions. This short paper reviews ...

Orthosiphon stamineus (Family: Lamiaceae) has becoming one of the popular medicinal plants in Malaysia due to its high beneficial effects in treating diabetes mellitus, hypertension and kidney stones. The present study was conducted to evaluate the mechanism of O. stamineus in affecting metabolism of aminopyrine in female rat hepatocytes via second messenger pathway. Liver perfusion was used to...

BACKGROUND While complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is commonly used in the United States and elsewhere, and hazardous interactions with prescription drugs can occur, patients do not regularly communicate with physicians about their CAM use. The objective of this study was to discover patient information needs and preferences for herb-drug-disease interaction alerts. METHODS We recr...

Herb-drug interaction predictions remain challenging. Physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling was used to improve prediction accuracy of potential herb-drug interactions using the semipurified milk thistle preparation, silibinin, as an exemplar herbal product. Interactions between silibinin constituents and the probe substrates warfarin (CYP2C9) and midazolam (CYP3A) were simulate...

Plants have been used throughout human history for their medicinal properties and herbal medicines are popular worldwide. Since, all herbal medicines are mixtures of more than one active ingredient, such combinations of many substances obviously increase the likelihood of interactions taking place. Although herbal medicines have been used as remedies for number of illnesses, many of them have s...