Planta Med 2011; 77 - PK11
DOI: 10.1055/s-0031-1282641

Pharmacoeconomic evaluation of peppermint tea-bag products using graph theory

A Elezovic 1, A Elezovic 2, A Uzunovic 1, S Pilipovic 1, S Hadzidedic 1
  • 1Agency for Medicinal Products and Medical Devices, Titova 9, 71000, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina;
  • 2Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Sarajevo, Cekalusa 90, 71000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Peppermint (Mentha x piperita L.) has very long tradition of medicinal use due to its essential oil content. It is often also used as tea and food flavoring. The content of essential oil of peppermint leaf is crucial for its medicinal, but also flavoring effects. There are plethora of tea products on the market for the consumers to choose from, usually based on the product's price and the external package appearance. The consumers commonly don't have the insight into the tea-bag's content pharmacognostic and chemical quality.

We have used pharmacoeconomic framework to make the surveillance of ten peppermint tea-bag products present on Bosnian and Herzegovinian market.

Consumers were asked to give grades 1–10 for the products external packaging. The unit price was determined for each product. Pharmacists were asked to rate organoleptic appearance of herbal content of tea-bags. Modified methods of GC and GC-MS analysis described by Kowalski and Wawrzykowski where used for the essential oil determination.

The graph theory was chosen to sum up all results of different parameters for each product and give a quantitative estimate of the pharmacoeconomic acceptability. Relationship between tested parameters is presented in Figure 1.

The obtained results reflect balance between external value on one side (<1) and pharmacognostic quality (>1), while value of 1 represents perfect balance of tested opposites. Of ten tested products, in 8 predominated external value (0,19 to 0,70), while in 2 products predominated pharmacognostic quality (1,67 and 1,77). The graph theory was useful in assessment of herbal products.

Figure 1: Relationship between tested quality parameters

References: 1. Diestel R (2005) Graph Theory Electronic Edition. Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, New York, USA

2. Guidelines for the economic evaluation of health technologies: Canada URL: http://www.ispor.org/PEguidelines/source/HTAGuidelinesfortheEconomicEvaluationofHealthTechnologies-Canada.pdf (Accesed December 2008)

3. Kowalski R, Wawrzykowski J (2008) Flavour Fragr J 24: 31–35