Natural Health Products Online Solution

Natural Health Products Ingredients Database

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database is a repository of scientific terminologies and Pre-cleared Information approved by the Natural Health Products Directorate (NHPD).

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database is designed to:

• capture and provide access to a scientific repository of approved medicinal and non-medicinal ingredient information as well as NHPD monograph and abbreviated labelling standards information;
• validate content of product license applications as they are prepared electronically; and
• serve as a world-class reference standard for internal assessment, and for the natural health products industry.

At present, there is no other internationally-known and/or agreed-upon list and/or primary reference that provides exhaustive details of substances or terms relating to natural health products in Canada.

On this basis, the Natural Heath Products Online System uses a combination of two existing standards:

1. Naming conventions: for ingredients that have been adapted from the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration Approved Terminology for Medicines (TGA).
2. Terminologies: for dosage forms, routes of administration, and units and measurements that have been adapted from the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) M5 controlled lists.

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database contains:

1. Medicinal ingredients;
2. Non-medicinal ingredients;
3. Non-Natural Health Product (NHP) ingredients (not allowed as medicinal ingredients in natural health products or under specific restrictions);
4. Selected single-ingredient NHPD monographs and selected single-ingredient abbreviated labelling standards (AbLS);
5. Ingredient details relevant to their type (for example, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbers for chemical substances, organism parts and preparations for organism substances, etc.);
6. Medicinal, non-medicinal, and non-NHP ingredient restriction details; and
7. Controlled vocabularies that represent a standard for the electronic transmission of core sets of natural health product information (e.g. lists for dosage forms, route of administrations, ingredient categories, organism parts, organism preparations, non-medicinal purposes, etc.)

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database excludes the NHPD approved ingredient information relating to:

1. Product names
2. Proprietary flavours
3. Homeopathic ingredients

Additional information regarding the scientific terminologies used in this database can be found in the Natural Health Products Online System Standard Terminology Guide.

Search Engine

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database includes a search engine that enables users to search and navigate easily through the defined ingredient terminology.

Please note that the search engine accepts only simple queries. No operators (such as "and","not", and "or") are supported. The ingredient search tool is designed to search and retrieve data from the Natural Health Products Ingredients Database. It can be used for searching the controlled vocabularies as well as both medicinal and non-medicinal ingredients.

For ingredient searches, the following fields can be searched:

• NHPID name;
• Common names;
• Proper names;
• Taxonomical synonyms (Taxa); and
• Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbers.

For additional information, please select the Natural Health Products Online System Standard Terminology Guide .

Issue Form

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database is a dynamic information repository that is continuously updated to reflect the most recent findings within the NHP industry.

The NHPD has established a standardized approach of receiving inquiries and to identifying issues with the Natural Health Products Ingredients Database using the Natural Health Products Ingredients Database Issue Form.

The Natural Health Products Ingredients Database Issue Form captures the details necessary to make a timely and accurate decision regarding requests for potential improvements to the Natural Health Products Ingredients Database.

Types of requests include:

• Addition of new ingredient
• Addition to an existing ingredient (such as a new non-medicinal purpose)
• Change
• Deletion
• General request
• Typographic or other spelling error correction
• Classification requests

Select the Natural Health Products Ingredients Database Issues Form Guide for additional information on the proper completion and submission process.