EVALUATION OF STORAGE DEPENDENT STABILITY OF PICRORHIZA KURROA POWDERED DRUG (KUTKI CHURNA) BY HPLC STUDY

Ayurveda, the eternal life science, has vast heritage of knowledge with its well established basic principles. The concept of stability is one of such important issues regarding Ayurvedic drug formulations. Sharngadhara Samhita (14th century A.D.), the pioneer in this regard, gave detailed description of this concept. According to this reference churna kalpana is potent up to two months after which it starts to degrade gradually. In those days of Acharya Sharngadhara it has been advocated to make use of fresh herbs for manufacturing different drug formulations which is not feasible in the present era of widely expanded commercialized pharma sector due to various factors like availability of the herbs, increasing pollution and deforestation, etc. Therefore it’s the need of the hour to focus our attention on the stability of Ayurvedic drugs. Churna Kalpana, the most commonly used Ayurvedic drug formulation by almost all Ayurvedic practitioners, has been considered for assessing and revisualising the stability concept. Kutaki churna was tested after a successive interval of two months. Two types of packaging were considered for this study. No special storage conditions were provided let all the environmental factors affect these drugs as they can. So storage conditions were same for both the drugs. Here in the present article a scientific and rational attempt has been made to establish the concept of stability of Ayurvedic single herbal powder drug formulation (churna kalpana) by using a new scientific modern technique of chromatography i.e. HPLC. Along with HPLC some physico-chemical tests were also performed to check the stability of the formulation. Results obtained show the degradation in these drugs in a specific manner with respect to the packaging which has been elaborated in the article.