Chrysanthemum: Antioxidants and Heart Health

This is the claim where chrysanthemum has the best data and the weakest conclusion, and the two facts are not in tension — they are the whole story. What is in the cup is genuinely well characterised. Published HPLC analyses of Chrysanthemum morifolium flower teas have quantified the flavones (luteolin, apigenin, acacetin and their glucosides) and the phenolic acids (chlorogenic acid, 3,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid) with real precision, and shown that cultivar and flower colour measurably change the profile. The infusion scores highly on every standard chemical antioxidant assay.

What none of that establishes is a health outcome. There is no adequately powered randomized controlled trial showing that chrysanthemum tea lowers blood pressure, improves lipids, changes vascular function, or reduces cardiovascular events in humans. The mechanism literature is broad and interesting and entirely preclinical. This page explains what the antioxidant numbers actually measure, why "high antioxidant capacity" has repeatedly failed to predict health outcomes, what the traditional blood-pressure indication really says, and what the honest comparison with hibiscus — a floral tea that does have randomized trials — looks like.

Species, as always: Chrysanthemum morifolium is the tea flower. Chrysanthemum indicum (ye ju hua) is a separate, more bitter pharmacopoeial herb with a different use profile and different chemistry. Tanacetum cinerariifolium — pyrethrum, formerly classified in Chrysanthemum — is the insecticide plant and is not a tea.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Actually in the Cup
2. What DPPH, ABTS and FRAP Really Measure
3. Why "High Antioxidant" Stopped Being a Health Claim
4. The Bioavailability Problem
5. Brewing and Flower Quality Dominate the Polyphenol Content
6. Blood Pressure: the Traditional Claim and the Missing Trial
7. The Hibiscus Comparison
8. Chlorogenic Acid: the One Constituent With Human Data
9. Lipids, Platelets and Endothelial Function
10. The Sugar in the Can Is the Real Cardiovascular Variable
11. Medication Interactions and Who Should Be Careful
12. The Verdict
13. Key Research Papers
14. Connections

What Is Actually in the Cup

Evidence tier: well established (analytical chemistry). This is the one part of chrysanthemum's profile where the numbers are solid, because measuring compounds is a much easier problem than measuring outcomes.

• Chlorogenic acid and dicaffeoylquinic acids. Typically the most abundant single phenolics in the dried flower and in the infusion. Chlorogenic acid is the same caffeoylquinic acid that makes coffee one of the largest dietary polyphenol sources in Western diets, and 3,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid is a consistent chrysanthemum marker. These compounds dominate most measured "total antioxidant capacity" of the tea.
• Flavones — luteolin, apigenin, acacetin, diosmetin and their derivatives, present both free and as 7-O-glucosides. Luteolin-7-O-glucoside and apigenin-7-O-glucoside are the usual dominant glycosides. These are the constituents behind every mechanistic story told about chrysanthemum.
• Essential oil, roughly one percent or less of dry weight — camphor, borneol, bornyl acetate, chrysanthenone, 1,8-cineole, α-pinene, germacrene D. Only partly water-soluble, so an infusion contains far less of it than a distilled or solvent-extracted preparation. Cultivar-dependent, which is why Gongju and Hangbaiju smell different.
• Sesquiterpene lactones in small amounts — pharmacologically interesting, and the compound class behind daisy-family contact allergy. See Allergy Risk, Preparation and Safety.
• Polysaccharides, a large preclinical literature reviewed in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules in 2024 by Zhang and colleagues — and a fraction that a three-minute hot-water steep barely extracts.
• Carotenoids and other pigments in the yellow cultivars, contributing colour and some antioxidant capacity. Note: essentially not the macular carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin in meaningful amounts.
• No caffeine. This is the practical difference between chrysanthemum and green tea, and it matters for the cardiovascular discussion because caffeine has its own acute blood-pressure effect that chrysanthemum simply does not bring to the table.

Han and colleagues, in “Phytochemical composition and antioxidant activities of two different color chrysanthemum flower teas” in Molecules (2019), did the useful thing of analysing the flowers as a tea rather than as a solvent extract, and reported both the phenolic profile and the antioxidant assay results with the cultivars distinguished. The same group's earlier work in the International Journal of Analytical Chemistry (2017) quantified phenolics in a new cultivar by HPLC with diode-array detection and mass spectrometry. These are the papers to read if you want to know what your cup contains, and their most important collective finding is variability — "chrysanthemum tea" is not one defined substance.

What DPPH, ABTS and FRAP Really Measure

Chrysanthemum infusions perform well on the standard chemical antioxidant assays. It is worth knowing exactly what those assays do, because the gap between what they measure and what readers assume they measure is where most "superfood" marketing lives.

• DPPH — a stable purple radical in solution. You add your extract, and the extent to which the purple fades tells you how readily the extract donates electrons or hydrogen atoms to that particular synthetic radical. The radical does not exist in biology.
• ABTS (TEAC) — a similar decolourisation assay against a different synthetic radical cation, reported relative to a vitamin E analogue.
• FRAP — "ferric reducing antioxidant power". Measures how well the extract reduces a ferric-iron complex to ferrous. Iron reduction in a cuvette at controlled pH.
• ORAC — measures inhibition of a fluorescent probe's oxidation by peroxyl radicals. Notably, the US Department of Agriculture withdrew its ORAC database in 2012, explicitly because the values were being misused to imply health benefits that the assay cannot support and because dietary ORAC values had no established relevance to human health.

All four are chemistry, performed in a test tube, in the absence of a body. A high score tells you an extract contains reducing compounds. It says nothing about whether those compounds are absorbed, whether they survive gut and liver metabolism, whether they reach any relevant tissue, whether their metabolites retain activity, or whether reducing that tissue's oxidative load would improve anything. It is a compositional fact.

Two sanity checks make the point better than any argument. Coffee, red wine and dark chocolate all score extremely highly. So do many things nobody proposes eating. And the ranking of foods by antioxidant assay has never lined up with the ranking of foods by measured health outcome in cohort studies or trials.

So when a chrysanthemum product's marketing quotes a DPPH or ORAC figure, the correct response is not scepticism about the number — the number is probably accurate — but recognition that the number is not the kind of thing that can support a health claim.

Why "High Antioxidant" Stopped Being a Health Claim

This deserves its own section because it is the single most useful piece of context a reader can have when evaluating any polyphenol-rich food.

The oxidative-stress hypothesis of chronic disease was a serious, well-motivated idea: reactive oxygen species damage lipids, proteins and DNA; that damage accumulates; therefore supplementing antioxidants should slow disease. It generated an enormous amount of research and a very large consumer market. And then it was tested in humans, at scale, in randomized trials, and it largely failed.

The pattern across large antioxidant supplement trials was consistent and sobering. High-dose beta-carotene trials in smokers found increased lung cancer incidence rather than decreased. Large vitamin E trials for cardiovascular prevention found no benefit, and pooled analyses raised concerns at high doses. A major prostate-cancer prevention trial of vitamin E and selenium found no benefit and a signal of harm in one arm. Antioxidant vitamin combinations for cardiovascular prevention have repeatedly come out neutral.

Why it failed matters, because the reasons apply directly to chrysanthemum:

1. Reactive oxygen species are signalling molecules, not just damage. They mediate insulin sensitivity, exercise adaptation, immune killing of pathogens and apoptosis of damaged cells. Blanket suppression is not obviously desirable, and some of the trial harms are best explained this way.
2. The body has its own layered antioxidant machinery — superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione peroxidase, the thioredoxin system — which is regulated, localised and vastly more consequential than a few milligrams of dietary reductant.
3. The interesting effects of polyphenols probably are not antioxidant effects at all. Current thinking leans toward polyphenols acting as mild stressors that upregulate the body's own defences (the Nrf2 pathway), or as modulators of signalling, enzymes and the gut microbiome. If so, their in-vitro radical-scavenging score is close to irrelevant to how they actually work.
4. Whole foods are not their extracts. Cohort studies associating polyphenol-rich diets with better outcomes cannot be reduced to a supplement, and when they have been, the supplement usually fails.

The honest conclusion for chrysanthemum: its high antioxidant assay score is a true statement about the extract and a very weak basis for expecting a health benefit. It belongs in the "interesting chemistry" column, not the "reason to drink it medicinally" column.

The Bioavailability Problem

Even setting aside whether antioxidant activity is the right mechanism, there is a quantitative gap between the in-vitro work and a cup of tea that is rarely stated plainly.

The dose. Five to ten dried flower heads is roughly 1–3 g of dried flower. Depending on cultivar, grade and brewing, that delivers on the order of tens of milligrams of total phenolics, of which the flavones are a minority fraction — a few milligrams of mixed luteolin, apigenin and acacetin derivatives, spread across a whole adult.

The absorption. Flavone glycosides are hydrolysed in the gut, absorbed modestly, and then extensively conjugated — glucuronidated and sulphated — in the enterocyte and the liver before they ever reach systemic circulation. Plasma concentrations of free aglycone after a dietary dose are typically in the low nanomolar to sub-micromolar range. Much of the ingested polyphenol never gets absorbed at all and is instead metabolised by colonic bacteria into a wholly different set of small phenolic compounds, which are increasingly suspected of being where the real biology happens.

The in-vitro concentrations. Cell-culture experiments demonstrating NF-κB suppression, nitric-oxide reduction or vasorelaxation typically use micromolar to tens-of-micromolar concentrations of pure aglycone applied directly to cells — often one to three orders of magnitude above achievable plasma levels of the free compound, and in a chemical form that circulating metabolites do not match.

This is not a nitpick, it is the central issue. Any sentence of the form "chrysanthemum contains luteolin, which does X in cells, therefore chrysanthemum tea does X in you" fails at this step. It is the same gap that has sunk countless promising nutraceutical mechanisms, and honest reading of the chrysanthemum literature requires holding it in mind on every claim.

Brewing and Flower Quality Dominate the Polyphenol Content

An underappreciated practical point: the variation introduced by which flowers you bought and how you brewed them is larger than any subtlety of pharmacology being argued about.

Factors that measurably change what is in your cup:

• Cultivar and grade. Analytical comparisons of chrysanthemum flower teas have found substantially different phenolic and flavone profiles between cultivars and between flower colours. Hangbaiju, Gongju, Boju, Chuju, taiju buds and yellow Jinsihuangju are not chemically interchangeable.
• Processing. Hangbaiju is steamed then dried; Gongju is baked; Boju is sun-dried. The steaming step deactivates browning enzymes, which is why good Hangbaiju stays pale — and enzymatic and thermal history affect polyphenol survival.
• Whole heads versus crumbs. Broken flowers extract faster and more bitterly. Tea bags are usually made from broken material.
• Water temperature. Just off the boil (around 90 °C) versus fully boiling changes both extraction rate and the balance of pleasant to bitter compounds.
• Steep time. Three minutes versus fifteen is a large difference in extracted phenolic — and in astringency. There is no evidence the extra phenolic buys you anything, and it definitely costs you flavour.
• Number of infusions. Good flowers give two or three; the first is not the whole story.
• Storage. Light, heat and humidity degrade both flavones and volatile oil. Old flowers taste flat because they are chemically flatter.

The practical upshot: if the polyphenol content is the reason you are drinking it, buy whole intact flower heads by cultivar name, store them dark and dry, and brew short and hot rather than long and boiling. And then hold that decision lightly, because no human outcome has ever been shown to depend on it.

Blood Pressure: the Traditional Claim and the Missing Trial

Evidence tier: traditional use only, with preliminary mechanism. No adequately powered human trial.

Chrysanthemum is a genuine classical herb for what a modern reader would call hypertension — but it arrives there by a different route than a modern diagnosis. The relevant traditional action is "calms liver yang" (平肝), addressing a pattern of throbbing headache, dizziness, flushed face, irritability, tinnitus and red eyes. That symptom cluster overlaps substantially with how hypertension classically presented in clinic before routine measurement existed, which is why chrysanthemum appears in Chinese antihypertensive formulas and in Chinese dietary-therapy recommendations. Zou P's “Traditional Chinese medicine, food therapy and hypertension control: a narrative review of Chinese literature” in the American Journal of Chinese Medicine (2016) surveys that territory and lists chrysanthemum among the commonly used items.

Proposed mechanisms from preclinical work — each real as a laboratory finding, each a weak predictor of clinical effect:

• Vasorelaxation of isolated vessel preparations by flavonoid fractions.
• Calcium-channel effects of certain flavones in smooth muscle.
• ACE inhibition in vitro. Worth flagging specifically: almost every polyphenol-rich plant extract inhibits angiotensin-converting enzyme in a cuvette assay. It is close to a non-finding, and its track record as a predictor of clinical antihypertensive effect is poor.
• Mild diuresis, reported traditionally and in some animal work.
• Nitric-oxide-mediated endothelial effects attributed to flavones in cell and vessel models.

And here is the position, stated without hedging: there is no adequately powered, well-designed randomized controlled trial demonstrating that chrysanthemum tea lowers blood pressure in humans. Not in hypertensive patients, not in healthy volunteers, not acutely, not over weeks. You can check with a PubMed search for chrysanthemum blood pressure randomized trials.

What to actually do:

1. Drink the tea if you like it. It is caffeine-free, which is a genuine small advantage over coffee if you are watching your blood pressure.
2. Do not stop, reduce or skip antihypertensive medication because of it. Uncontrolled hypertension is silent and its consequences — stroke, heart failure, kidney disease — are not.
3. Measure at home. A validated upper-arm monitor, seated, rested, same time of day, several readings averaged. That is how anyone finds out what is actually happening, and it is worth vastly more than any herbal decision.
4. Put your effort where the evidence is: sodium reduction, potassium-rich whole foods, weight, alcohol, physical activity, sleep apnoea, and taking prescribed medication consistently. Those have trial evidence measured in millimetres of mercury and in prevented events. See Hypertension.

The Hibiscus Comparison

The most useful thing that can be said about chrysanthemum's blood-pressure claim is a comparison, because it shows what the evidence looks like when it exists.

Hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa, roselle) is also a floral tea, also polyphenol-rich, also traditionally used for blood pressure. But hibiscus has been through multiple randomized controlled trials in humans, and pooled analyses of those trials have reported modest but real reductions in systolic and diastolic blood pressure — typically in the range of a few millimetres of mercury. The trials are mostly small, quality varies, and the effect is well short of a medication. But they exist, they were prespecified, they measured blood pressure with instruments, and they can be criticised on their methods rather than on their absence.

That is the contrast. Two floral teas with similar traditional claims and similar chemistry classes; one has been tested and shows a small effect, the other has not been tested at all. If someone tells you chrysanthemum lowers blood pressure "like hibiscus", the correct answer is that hibiscus earned that sentence and chrysanthemum has not.

It also illustrates a useful general point: a small, real, measured effect looks nothing like a marketing claim. The hibiscus literature's honest summary is "a few mmHg, probably, in some people, with variable trial quality" — which is exactly the sort of unglamorous finding that a genuine effect produces, and exactly the sort of finding chrysanthemum does not have.

Chlorogenic Acid: the One Constituent With Human Data

There is one thread of the chrysanthemum cardiovascular story that connects to actual human research, and it is worth following honestly — including to its limits.

Chlorogenic acid is usually the most abundant phenolic in chrysanthemum flowers, and it has been studied in humans in its own right, mostly in the context of coffee and of green-coffee-bean extracts. There are small randomized trials of chlorogenic acid supplementation reporting modest blood-pressure reductions, and a body of work on chlorogenic acid, glucose handling and endothelial function. The literature is searchable on PubMed.

Four reasons this does not transfer to chrysanthemum tea:

1. Dose. The human chlorogenic acid trials generally use supplemental doses in the hundreds of milligrams per day. A cup of chrysanthemum tea supplies a small fraction of that. A cup of coffee supplies considerably more chlorogenic acid than a cup of chrysanthemum tea does.
2. Trial quality. Much of the green-coffee-extract literature is small, industry-linked and of mixed quality, and the field has a history of retracted or discredited work. It is not a firm foundation to lean a second claim on.
3. Matrix. An isolated compound in a capsule and the same compound in a floral infusion alongside dozens of others are not interchangeable.
4. Nobody has closed the loop. There is no study giving people chrysanthemum tea and measuring blood pressure. Reasoning from "chrysanthemum contains chlorogenic acid" plus "chlorogenic acid supplements may lower BP slightly" to "chrysanthemum tea lowers BP" is inference across two unbridged gaps.

The fair summary: chlorogenic acid is the most promising constituent of chrysanthemum from a cardiovascular standpoint, and the promise belongs to the compound at supplemental doses, not to the tea. If chlorogenic acid intake is what you are after, coffee is a far larger dietary source.

Lipids, Platelets and Endothelial Function

Evidence tier: preliminary (animal and in vitro) for all of the following.

• Lipids. Rodent studies of chrysanthemum extracts and of isolated flavones have reported reductions in total and LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in high-fat-fed animals, with proposed mechanisms including effects on hepatic lipid handling and on intestinal absorption. No human trial of chrysanthemum tea and lipid panels exists.
• Endothelial function. Flavones including luteolin and apigenin improve endothelium-dependent relaxation and reduce markers of endothelial activation in cell and vessel models. Endothelial function is a legitimate intermediate cardiovascular outcome and can be measured in humans non-invasively — which makes the absence of a chrysanthemum study on it notable rather than excusable.
• Platelet aggregation. Some flavones inhibit platelet aggregation in vitro. The clinical relevance at dietary exposures is unestablished, but this is worth knowing about for the interaction discussion below.
• Atherosclerosis models. Preclinical work on chrysanthemum extracts and flavones in animal models of vascular inflammation and plaque development. Interesting, remote from a teacup.
• Blood glucose. Reports of hypoglycaemic effects in animal models, and in-vitro inhibition of α-glucosidase and aldose reductase by flavonoids. No human data for chrysanthemum tea.

Reading this literature usefully means noticing what is absent: chrysanthemum tea is cheap, safe for most people, universally available and easy to administer. Its human intermediate-outcome studies — brachial flow-mediated dilation, ambulatory blood pressure, lipid panels — would be inexpensive and straightforward to run. Nobody has run them, which is best explained by the absence of a commercial sponsor rather than by any negative result.

The Sugar in the Can Is the Real Cardiovascular Variable

This section is short and it is the most cardiovascularly relevant thing on the page.

The overwhelming majority of chrysanthemum tea consumed worldwide is sweetened, ready-to-drink, canned or bottled. It is standard convenience-store stock across East and Southeast Asia. Many of these products contain sugar at soft-drink concentrations — commonly in the region of 20–30 g per serving, sometimes more.

Sugar-sweetened beverage intake has a substantial human epidemiological literature associating it with weight gain, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease — a body of evidence incomparably stronger than anything in the chrysanthemum literature. So for a reader drinking two or three sweetened cans a day for their heart, the net cardiovascular effect is plausibly negative, and it is driven entirely by the sugar.

The practical instruction is simple: brew your own flowers, or read the label. Unsweetened, or sweetened lightly by you, chrysanthemum tea is a pleasant zero-calorie caffeine-free drink and a perfectly sensible replacement for a soft drink — which is, ironically, the largest genuine cardiovascular benefit available from this plant, and it comes from what the tea displaces rather than from what it contains.

Medication Interactions and Who Should Be Careful

No clinically significant drug interaction with chrysanthemum tea has been documented in humans, largely because nobody has looked. The theoretical considerations worth knowing:

• Antihypertensives. If chrysanthemum has genuine hypotensive activity — unproven — it would be additive to medication. Monitor rather than assume, and never adjust prescribed doses on your own.
• Antidiabetic medication. Same logic for the animal hypoglycaemic reports. If you use insulin or a sulfonylurea and take up a new daily herbal drink, checking your glucose more often for a week is cheap and sensible.
• Anticoagulants and antiplatelets. In-vitro platelet inhibition by flavones is reported; the clinical relevance at tea-level exposures is likely negligible, but flag daily heavy intake to your prescriber if you are on warfarin or a DOAC.
• Licorice-containing blends. Worth naming specifically because chrysanthemum is often blended with licorice root. Glycyrrhizin at sustained intake causes potassium loss, sodium retention and raised blood pressure. If you drink licorice-chrysanthemum blends daily and are watching your blood pressure, that is the ingredient to worry about, not the flower.
• Concentrated extracts are the form where all of these theoretical concerns become less theoretical, and also where the allergy risk concentrates. There is no established dose and no human data.
• Sulphite-sensitive asthma. Sulphur-fumigated flowers may carry sulphite residues. See Allergy Risk, Preparation and Safety and Sulfites.
• Asteraceae allergy remains the one genuinely well-documented human risk of this plant, and it is not a cardiovascular matter but it outranks everything on this page in practical importance.

The Verdict

• Constituent profile — well established. Chlorogenic acid, dicaffeoylquinic acids, luteolin, apigenin, acacetin, essential oil, no caffeine. Quantified by HPLC in published analyses, and genuinely variable by cultivar and brewing.
• Test-tube antioxidant capacity — well established and clinically uninformative. High DPPH, ABTS and FRAP values are a fact about the extract, not a health claim. The USDA withdrew its own ORAC database rather than see it misused this way.
• Anti-inflammatory, vasorelaxant, lipid and glucose effects — preliminary. Consistent in cells and rodents, at concentrations a cup of tea cannot produce in a human.
• Blood pressure in humans — no trial evidence. Traditional indication is real ("calms liver yang"); modern demonstration is absent.
• Lipids, endothelial function, cardiovascular events in humans — no trial evidence.
• Chlorogenic acid — the constituent with real human data, at doses the tea does not deliver.
• The largest genuine cardiovascular benefit available here is displacing a sugar-sweetened drink or a late coffee with unsweetened chrysanthemum tea. That is a real, evidence-consistent gain, and it comes from what the tea replaces.

Drink it as a drink. Do not buy it as a cardiovascular intervention, do not let it substitute for blood-pressure medication or home monitoring, and be aware that the sweetened can undoes the whole argument.

Key Research Papers

All citations are PubMed topic searches rather than numeric identifiers, so no link can quietly resolve to the wrong paper. Named papers have their title, journal and year in the text.

1. Han AR and colleagues, “Phytochemical composition and antioxidant activities of two different color chrysanthemum flower teas”, Molecules (2019) — the flowers analysed as a tea, with cultivars distinguished. The single most useful paper for knowing what is in your cup. Find it on PubMed.
2. Han AR and colleagues, “Quantification of antioxidant phenolic compounds in a new chrysanthemum cultivar by HPLC with diode array detection and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry”, International Journal of Analytical Chemistry (2017). Find it on PubMed.
3. Liu Y and colleagues, “Chrysanthemum morifolium as a traditional herb: a review of historical development, classification, phytochemistry, pharmacology and application”, Journal of Ethnopharmacology (2024) — the comprehensive species review, including the cardiovascular pharmacology. Find it on PubMed.
4. Zou P, “Traditional Chinese medicine, food therapy and hypertension control: a narrative review of Chinese literature”, American Journal of Chinese Medicine (2016) — context for the traditional blood-pressure indication, and a fair illustration of how weak the underlying evidence is. Find it on PubMed.
5. Zhang ZJ and colleagues, “Review of polysaccharides from Chrysanthemum morifolium Ramat.: extraction, purification, structural characteristics, health benefits, structure–activity relationships and applications”, International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (2024). Find it on PubMed.
6. Chrysanthemum and blood pressure in randomized human studies — run this yourself. The emptiness of the result set is the finding this page rests on. PubMed topic search.
7. Hibiscus sabdariffa and blood pressure — randomized trials and meta-analyses. The contrast case: what a floral tea's evidence looks like when trials have actually been done. PubMed topic search.
8. Chlorogenic acid and blood pressure in humans — the one chrysanthemum constituent with human trial data, at supplemental doses the tea does not deliver. PubMed topic search.
9. Antioxidant supplement trials and mortality — the large randomized literature that ended the simple antioxidant hypothesis, including the beta-carotene and vitamin E results. Essential calibration for any "high antioxidant" claim. PubMed topic search.
10. Limitations of in-vitro antioxidant capacity assays — why DPPH, ORAC and FRAP values do not predict health outcomes, and why the USDA withdrew its ORAC database. PubMed topic search.
11. Polyphenol bioavailability and metabolism — glucuronidation, sulphation, colonic microbial metabolites, and achievable plasma concentrations. The gap between the cell dish and the cup. PubMed topic search.
12. Luteolin and apigenin cardiovascular pharmacology — vasorelaxation, endothelial and anti-inflammatory mechanisms, all preclinical. PubMed topic search.
13. Sugar-sweetened beverages and cardiometabolic risk — the large human literature that makes the canned version's sugar the dominant variable. PubMed topic search.
14. Licorice, glycyrrhizin and blood pressure — relevant because licorice is a common chrysanthemum blending partner and is the ingredient in that blend with a real pressor effect. PubMed topic search.

Connections

• All Herbs
• Chrysanthemum — Benefits Deep Dive — the hub, with the evidence summary for all four claims.
• Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium) — cultivars, grades, compounds, dosage and cautions.
• Chrysanthemum — Allergy Risk, Preparation and Safety — the one well-documented human risk, plus buying and brewing.
• Chrysanthemum Tea for Eye Health and Screen Strain — where the same flavones are invoked for a different claim.
• Hibiscus — Blood Pressure — the contrast case, and the floral tea with randomized trials.
• Hypertension — what actually moves blood pressure, measured in mmHg and prevented events.
• Luteolin — chrysanthemum's signature flavone, in depth.
• Apigenin — the other major flavone, shared with chamomile.
• Antioxidants — the category index, and the wider story about what these compounds do.
• EGCG — the polyphenol with the largest human literature, for scale.
• Green Tea — EGCG and Antioxidants — the same antioxidant argument examined where trials exist.
• Green Tea — Brewing Time and Temperature — how brewing variables change extraction in any infusion.
• Hibiscus — the full herb page.
• Sulfites — relevant to sulphur-fumigated dried flowers.

Safety and disclaimer. This article is educational and is not medical advice. Chrysanthemum's antioxidant and cardiovascular claims rest on analytical chemistry and preclinical work; no randomized controlled trial shows that chrysanthemum tea lowers blood pressure, improves lipids or reduces cardiovascular risk in humans. Do not stop, reduce or skip prescribed antihypertensive, antidiabetic or anticoagulant medication on the strength of a herbal tea, and do not treat a herbal drink as a substitute for home blood-pressure monitoring or medical follow-up. Chrysanthemum is an Asteraceae plant — anyone allergic to ragweed, mugwort, chamomile, feverfew, marigold or arnica should read the allergy and safety page first. Never brew flowers of unknown species, and never brew pyrethrum. Talk to a clinician or pharmacist before adding concentrated chrysanthemum extracts to any prescribed regimen, and during pregnancy or breastfeeding.

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