Could This Popular Abortion-Inducing Drug Have Some Hidden Health Benefits?

We’re a week away from a presidential election and abortion has been a hot-button campaign issue on both sides of the aisle. But there’s a bit of common ground when it comes to mifepristone, a type of steroid often used to terminate a pregnancy.

A wide swath of Americans agree that the drug should be available nationwide … and a new study suggests it might help slow or reverse the effects of aging.

What we already knew

This isn’t the first time mifepristone has been used for purposes other than inducing an abortion. Individuals with Cushing’s disease, for example, have been prescribed the drug to treat a number of symptoms, including:

• Endometritis
• Elevated blood sugar
• Uterine fibroids

But if mifepristone works on humans the way it appears to work on fruit flies, there will likely be many more people lining up to take it.

Age ain’t nothing but a number

Flies are known for having particularly short lives, but when a group of researchers from the University of Southern California administered the drug to female fruit flies they noticed that it seemed to possess some anti-aging properties.

In fact, it worked better by itself than rapamycin, an immunosuppressant known to have similar benefits. The median lifespan extension recorded through mifepristone was 114%, whereas rapamycin was only associated with an 81% increase.

The resulting study has been published in the Fly scientific journal, and the researchers summed up their findings: “The data suggest that mifepristone and rapamycin act through a common pathway to increase mated female Drosophila [fruit fly] life span.”

Before you get too excited, it’s worth noting that just because something works on flies doesn’t mean it’ll benefit us. But the latest evidence should be enough to warrant additional research into the topic.

Chris Agee October 29th, 2024

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