Herbal-based slimming products which are consumed orally may be contaminated with heavy metals as well as microorganisms. This study aimed to evaluate the safety level of these slimming products by determining heavy metals and microbial contamination in different batch production. Six different brands of herbal-based slimming products (A, B, C, G, H and I) with three different batch productions (1, 2 and 3) were investigated (n =18). Five heavy metals Arsenic, Cadmium, Chromium, Copper and Zinc were determined using an Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). The presence of microorganisms was determined by total aerobic count and the bacteria were identified. The samples’ moisture content was determined by calculating the percentage of water loss after drying process. All batches of samples A and B had high content of zinc, over the permissible level of 5ppm while, 6 samples contained Chromium above the permissible level (1.5 ppm). All 3 batches of sample A presented with the highest total daily intake of heavy metals. Bacteria were present in all the samples tested with the highest numbers in samples G, H and A followed by B, I and C. The highest number of fungi was found in product A while product I was free from fungal contamination. Aspergillus spp. was the predominant fungus present in the samples. There was a weak correlation between moisture content and bacteria (r = 0.087) and fungal (r = 0.253) presence in the samples. As some herbal slimming products contain heavy metals as well as microorganisms, consumers need to be more vigilant and discerning when selecting products to be consumed.
Metals, Heavy

Human salivary exosomes have been identified as a highly informative nanovesicle with clinical-relevant information for variation of diagnostic purposes. As a continued effort from previous studies on human salivary exosomes effect at gene expression level, this study is carried out to observe the morphology of human periodontal fibroblast (HPdLF) treated with exosomes cells under the same period of changes in genotypic level occurred. In vitro, HPdLF cells were cultured for 24 hours with 10 µg/ml of human salivary exosomes. The morphology of HPdLF cells was examined under inverted light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) for both control samples and samples treated with human salivary exosomes, while the cell count was performed via trypan blue staining. There was no significant difference in the morphology under the inverted light microscopy and the cell number of HPdLF cells for both treated and untreated cells with exosomes. However, for SEM, the treated HPdLF with salivary exosomes showed slight observable changes on the filopodia, lamellipodia, cytoplasmic vesicles and the cytoskeleton of the cells. Even within a short period (24 hours) of culturing time for cells with human salivary exosomes, the samples showed minimal changes which positively suggested a simultaneous event of exchanging materials from human salivary exosomes to cells had occurred, hence, potentially proving that human salivary exosomes can enhance cell proliferation