Feverfew Flower compound a potential cure?

[nuji]

Hello!

Has anyone got info/experience with Feverfew flower as a potential treatment for CLL?

technology.org/2019/08/02/f...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/161...

sciencedirect.com/topics/me...

mskcc.org/cancer-care/integ...

[JigFettler Volunteer]

Would be nice - hard to understand how the cause of my CLL maybe reverse engineered.

Jig

[WinJ3]

I heard it’s also good for migraines.

[cajunjeff]

Nuji, feverfew is one of more than a dozen or so plants that supposedly have some sort of anti cancer qualities. The articles you link to are similar to many articles associated with so called cancer curing plants.

It looks to me like they isolate some sort of compound from the plant, put it in dish (in vitro) with cll cells and since the cll cells die, they conclude this plant might be a treatment for cancer and that more studies are needed.

Its very difficult to conclude much, either way, from such limited studies. The first article that you linked to about feverfew was written in 2005. I cant see any real progress in turning it into a cll drug since then. I imagine there are dozens upon dozens of substances that kill cancer cells in a test tube. Thats a far, far cry away from a drug being proven effective in human clinical trials.

All that said, it would be wonderful if a plant called feverfew cured my cll. Lots of medicines come from plants.

[LeoPa]

The second link is about AML, the third link does not mention CLL only leukemias wich there are many different kinds of. If you take this compound and notice an improvement to your CLL please make another post. I drink chamomile tea more or less regularly. I can't say whether it's helping or not.

[Alobs]

Unfortunately there is no cure for cancer, including leukemia and CLL.

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to Alobs]

Some cancers are curable, including many leukaemias and lymphomas, particularly the acute blood cancers. The chronic ones are tougher to cure. For example, Richter's Transformation is curable (sadly not often enough), but as the first article states, CLL 'is incurable, but the onset is so slow people live normal lives for many years.'

With the older chemo treatments, I can understand that until a CLL cell starts to divide, the CLL DNA isn't going to be damaged by the chemo, so apoptosis won't be triggered. (This is why adding rituximab to fludarabine and cyclophosphamide giving us FCR, was so successful. Rituximab is a targeted therapy that kills CLL in another way).

The new inhibitor drugs have to inhibit CLL cells long enough for apoptosis triggers to take effect. These apoptosis triggers are normally cancelled by 'stay alive' messages, which the inhibitor drugs block.

The first reference, which is specifically about CLL, doesn't explain how feverfew selectively kills CLL cells, but it illustrates the classic benefits of cancer research that may eventually result in a new drug being approved. With my emphasis :-

'This research is important not only because we have shown a way of producing parthenolide that could make it much more accessible to researchers, but also because we’ve been able to improve its “drug-like” properties to kill cancer cells. It’s a clear demonstration that parthenolide has the potential to progress from the flowerbed into the clinic”.'

In other words, they've both improved the extraction process of the active ingredient and they've found a way to modify it so it better kills CLL.

Neil

[nuji in reply to AussieNeil]

🤞🤞🤞 - hope it’s sooner than later

[Alobs in reply to AussieNeil]

I thought you could go into remission, but a cure? I've not heard of a cure before

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to Alobs]

Strictly you are correct, per theconversation.com/my-canc...

"...remission might mean cure but we only know that over time." Practically, the larger the difference between the typical remission time for a specific cancer and the time in remission, the more likely a specialist is to say you are cured.

[cajunjeff in reply to Alobs]

Some authoritative medical journals will start out with a discussion of "cancer" with the statement that cancer cannot be cured. In the same article they will write how certain cancers can be cured by certain treatments. Maybe I am just not smart enough to follow the distinction, for me its a distinction with very little difference.

The semantics are confusing. I think there are many cancers considered curable. The definition of cure is a moving target. For me cure just means that a cancer has been treated in a way where cancer cells cant be detected and are unlikely to come back.

Here is what web md says about curing cancer:

Unlike other diseases, cancer has its own language: There’s no cure for it, but there are treatments that may be able to cure some people of some cancers

webmd.com/cancer/guide/cure...

Wut? There is no cure for cancer but treatments may cure some cancers? Really?

I think we all know that "cancer" is a broad term for a group of cancers and that all cancers are not curable. But lots of people are cured from all sorts of cancers, using the word cure as a regular persons might use it.

I hate it when they write that cll is an incurable cancer. Some people are functionally cured of their cll by stem cell transplants. Some people are functionally cured of cll with FCR treatments. I think there is a high probability combination treatments with new drugs like ibrutinib and venetoclax will cure a certain subset of cll patients.