Tanacetum parthenium

Tanacetum parthenium, known as feverfew, or bachelor buttons, is a flowering plant in the daisy family, Asteraceae. It is a traditional medicinal herb that is used commonly to prevent migraine headaches. Occasionally, it is grown for ornament. It usually is identified in the literature with its synonyms, Chrysanthemum parthenium and Pyrethrum parthenium. The plant is a herbaceous perennial that grows into a small bush, up to 70 cm (28 in) high, with pungently-scented leaves. The leaves are light yellowish green, variously pinnatifid. The conspicuous daisy-like flowers are up to 20 mm across, borne in lax corymbs. The outer, ray florets have white ligules and the inner, disc florets are yellow and tubular. It spreads rapidly by seed, and will cover a wide area after a few years. Feverfew is native to Eurasia, specifically the Balkan Peninsula, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, but cultivation has spread it around the world and it now is found in the rest of Europe, North America, and Chile. A perennial herb, it should be planted in full sun, 38 to 46 cm (15–18 in) apart, and cut back to the ground in the autumn. It grows up to 70 cm (28 in) tall. It is hardy to USDA zone 5 (−30 °C (−22 °F)). Outside of its native range, it may become an invasive weed. In traditional herbal medicine, feverfew has been used for fever, headache, arthritis, and digestive problems. The active ingredients in feverfew include parthenolide. There has been some scientific interest in parthenolide, which has been shown to induce apoptosis in some cancer cell lines in vitro and, potentially, to target cancer stem cells. There are no published in vivo studies of parthenolide or feverfew for humans with cancer. The parthenolide content of commercially available feverfew supplements varies substantially, by more than 40-fold, despite labeling claims of 'standardization'. A study found that the parthenolide content of these supplements bore little resemblance to the content claimed on the product labels. In August of 2019, ScienceDaily reported that researchers at the University of Birmingham announced that they had developed a method to produce parthenolide directly from the plants and a way of modifying that parthenolide to produce a number of compounds, both of which techniques seem promising to enable clinical research into the potential of feverfew for medical applications.