Recent developments of heavy metals detection in traditional Chinese medicine by atomic spectrometry

•The developments, applications and recent trends for heavy metals detection in TCMs.•A brief review for heavy metals detection by recently developed atomic techniquess.•Future perspectives for heavy metals detection in TCM are discussed. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has unique effects in the prevention and treatment of diseases, and it makes great contributions to the development of society and the progress of medical civilization. However, the problem of excessive heavy metals in TCM has seriously hindered its development. This paper presents a brief and systemic review for the determination of heavy metals by the recently developed atomic techniques, including atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), atomic fluorescence spectrometry (AFS), inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The future perspective of this field is also discussed in this paper.