Single herbs and Chinese patent medicine preparations often have bad taste, such as bitterness and astringency, which is one of the key factors affecting patients' medication compliance, and would affect the therapeutic effect and restrict the extensive application in clinical practice. Therefore, how to make use of taste masking techniques to improve the bad taste of traditional Chinese medicines has become an important project. Through the collection and summarization of Chinese and foreign journals and papers in recent years, this paper discussed the generation mechanism of bitter taste, the new methods of masking bitter taste and the evaluation me-thods of bitter taste, in order to provide references for the taste masking of Chinese patent medicines preparations.
Astringents ; China ; Humans ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional ; Nonprescription Drugs/pharmacology* ; Taste

Taste is one of the important factors in the design of oral drug preparations. Polyphenols are the secondary metabolites produced in the growth process of Chinese medicine with a variety of physiological activities. However, astringency perceived from polyphenols tastes uncomfortable. As one of the true taste of Chinese medicine, astringency with drying, rough, and wrinkled sensation, seriously affects the texture of Chinese medicine and the compliance of patients. Due to the universality of polyphenolic astringency in Chinese medicine and the weakness of modern research, this study systematically reviewed and summarized the latest research on the mechanism of polyphenolic astringency, the astringency evaluation method, and the astringency-mitigation technology. Through comprehensively analyzing the quantification methods, such as sensory evaluation, animal preference evaluation, chemical evaluation, bionic evaluation, and polyphenol-protein interaction evaluation, the direction of overall astringency assessment with "unified dimension" was proposed. Since the characteristics of Chinese medicine and the mechanism of polyphenolic astringency did not reach a consensus, this study proposed the idea of astringency mitigation suitable for Chinese medicine. This study is intended to deepen the understanding of astringency associated with Chinese medicine, and establish a real and objective astringency evaluation method for Chinese medicine, thus promoting the technique of astringency mitigation of polyphenolic Chinese medicine preparations from trial and error to science.
Animals ; Astringents ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional ; Taste ; Polyphenols ; Sensation