Synonymy and Homonymy of Medicinal Plants in the Uppsala Monitoring
Centre’s Adverse Drug Reaction database
Hugo de Boer
The research was initiated by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, a research institute on
adverse drug reactions, which is a WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug
Monitoring. The Uppsala Monitoring Centre collects all adverse drug reactions from
the national centres for drug safety, and has over three million reports! Through
careful statistical analyses and examination drugs that are hazardous to human health
can be removed from the market. Adverse drug reaction monitoring is not only done
for conventional medicine, but also for herbal medicine. Herbal medicine has been
increasingly popular during the last decennia, and many people underestimate its
potential and possibility for causing interactions with other medicine. Fast and
accurate drug safety monitoring requires the nomenclature of ingredients in herbal
medicine to be correct and complete. However, the varying reliability in giving names
of ingredients in herbal medicine by producers and manufacturers causes much
difficulty in tracing adverse drug reactions to the source.
To gain more background information of synonyms and vernacular names of
the plant species used in herbal medicine the Uppsala Monitoring Centre has engaged
in a collaboration project with the Department of Systematic Botany of Uppsala
University. The purpose of this collaboration has been getting to know the full
synonymy of all plant species occurring in their database of adverse drug reactions.
This research thesis presents some 8000 synonyms and vernacular names of plant
species in their database. It is the result of half a year of intense bibliographical
research into medicinal plant names.
20 p Examensarbete I biologi
Department of Systematic Botany
Institution for Evolution, Genomics and Systematics
Evolutionary Biology Centre
Uppsala University