In the traditional medicine, plants are very important for the development of primary health care medicine mainly due to their ability to synthesize secondary metabolites with extraordinary therapeutic potentials against various diseases. The WHO estimates more than 80% of the world population rely on plant based remidies used as traditional medicine (Mukherjee, 2002, Bandaranayake, 2006, Ekor, 2014). The traditional medicines from plants origin are often easily accessible and cheaper with fewer side effects as compared to the synthetic alternate drugs. A lot of medicinal plants have been evaluated leading to the discovery of many promising compounds used in the formulation of new drugs or modifying the available drugs (Tourchi et al., 2016, Eruygur et al., 2019, Gao et al., 2022).

It has been corroborated that the medicines from herbal origin are capable to ameliorate intestinal injury (Huang et al., 2021, Huang et al., 2023) and regulate intestinal immune system (Lu et al., 2020, Wang et al., 2022). Various herbal medicines reduces heat and detoxification, reduces pain and swelling, stimulates blood circulation, and are used to cure hepatitis and urinary tract inflammation (Lu et al., 2020).

Among the plant families for herbal medicine, Asteraceae (Compositae) is one of the most diverse and significant family having almost ~1911 genera and ~32, 913 accepted species and 13 subfamilies (Panda et al., 2019). Since the old times, the consumption of herbs of the Asteraceae family as food and as medicine is continuing (Mohanta et al., 2023). Some of the Asteraceae plants have been cultivated for more than 3000 years as food and medicine. The Asteraceae plants are distributed throughout the word but most frequently distributed in the subtropical areas including arid and semi-arid regions (Bohm and Stuessy, 2001).

A lot of Asteraceae plants bear pharmacological potentials such as antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, antidiabetic, hepatoprotective and antiparasitic activities due to the presence of oils, polyphenolic compounds, lignans, saponins, phenolic acids, polysaccharides, sterols, and terpenoids etc (Koc et al., 2015; Rolink and Olas, 2021). The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the Artemisia genus from Asteraceae for the discovery of Artemisinin which have effective results against malaria (Daddy et al., 2017, Hussain et al., 2017, Panda and Luyten, 2018, da Silva et al., 2023).

Pakistan is rich in medicinal and aromatic plant species due to its diverse climate, habitat and soil types. According to an estimate, almost 6000 wild plant species (Ali, 2008) are present with nearly 600 species being used for medicinal purposes. About 80% of this medicinal plants are distributed naturally in the Northwestern and Northeastern regions of Pakistan (Ali and Qaiser, 2009, Ijaz et al., 2015).

More than 300 medicinal plants are traded in Pakistan and about 12% of the flora is taken as traditional medicine (Shinwari and Nasim, 2016) and the uses of medicinal plants has become a crucial aspect of their cultural heritage (Hussain et al., 2012a, Hussain et al., 2012b). The top 10 herbal manufacturers (Dawakhanas) in Pakistan consume about 2 million kg of 200 medicinal plants annually. Few medicinal plants in the Unani system are thought to be originated from the medicine of ancient Greece (Shinwari and Nasim, 2016). In the early 1950s, 84% Pakistani population were using indigenous medicinal plants as primary health care which is now restricted to some remote areas due to the rapid change in lifestyle (Bano et al., 2014a). In 1983, this percentage declined to 63% where people in some villages were reported to use plants as medicines (Ahmad and Habib, 2014). The medicinal plants uses in Pakistan are very vast but its rapid documention is essential to avoid the loss of essential ethnobotanical knowledge of specific plants (Hostettmann et al., 2000). According to Shinwari and Gilani (2003), nearly 60, 000 local healers (healers) and practitioners in the rural and distant regions of Pakistan use more than 200 different plant species as primary health care remedy against health problems.

Currently, the Traditional Medicine System in Pakistan face a number of challenges, such as the lack of information about market demand and lack of regulatiory bodies like traditional medicines act, strategies, policies, decreasing resources, action plans, research and development services, funds allocations and infrastructure etc (Hussain et al., 2012a, Hussain et al., 2012b).

As global ethnobotanical information and uses of plants by local people is beneficial not only for conserving traditional knowledge but also for drug development and community health care (Farooq et al., 2014). A wide-ranging ethnomedicinal data on Asteraceae plants from Pakistan may provoide a baseline data for the discovery of novel drug constituents and other products with the addition of pertinent data on the ongoing research on global Asteraceae ethnobotany. Inspired by the medicinal implication of the Asteraceae family, documrentation of a comprehensive and systematic review on ethnobotanical medicine of this family from Pakistan was necessary, which has not been summarized prfeviously. Therefore, the primary objective of this review was to compile all available data on ethnobotany of the Asteraceae family in Pakistan with the elucidation of species distribution pattern, geography, disease categories, growth forms, plant parts used, modes of preparatrion of ethnomedicine remedy and administration routes with emphasis on their global conservation status. It will also provide a comprehensive indigenous knowledge on Asteracea plants for the treatment of various diseases which are ready to be additionaly evaluated for pharmacological, biological, and toxicological characterization.