4. Discussion
The majority of preclinical toxicity studies assess the effect of plant extracts or essential oils after a single acute treatment. How- ever, the utilization of medicinal plants by traditional medicine has relied largely on long-term clinical experience with little or no sci- entific data on their efficacy or safety after long-term treatment (Ernst, 2004; Zhu et al., 2002). As is the case in relation to many other medicinal plant species, there are few toxicological/toxicoge- netic studies on the safety of Cymbopogon citratus.