The use of bracken fern as human food is mainly a historical question. The rhizomes of these plants served as human food in Scotland during the First World War. In America (USA, Canada), Russia, China and Japan, fern is grown commercially for human use. The usual procedure that is performed before eating the plant is to pre-treat the fern with boiling water in the presence of different chemicals, such as sodium bicarbonate and wood ash, to degrade or inactivate ptaquiloside and other toxic agents. Nevertheless, some carcinogenic activity persists even after the treatment. As shown by Kamon and Hirayama, the risk of oesophageal cancer was increased approximately by 2.1 in men and 3.7 in women who regularly consume bracken in Japan. Recent researches have suggested that sulfur-containing amino acids can potentially be used under appropriate conditions as detoxifying agents for ptaquiloside  and selenium supplementation can prevent as well as reverse the immunotoxic effects induced by ptaquiloside.
Ptaquiloside in the aqueous extract of bracken can be detected using different instrumental methods: thin-layer chromatography–densitometry (TLC-densitometry), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GCMS), and liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS). The diagnostic tests of ptaquiloside inside cells include gene mutation detection, immunohistochemical detection of tumor biomarkers, chromosomal aberrations, oxidative stress for EBH, PCR, real-time PCR and DNase-SISPA (sequence-independent single primer amplification).