...The Next 20 Years

What will health and wellness look like in 2045? Experts share their hopes, fears, and trend predictions for the two decades ahead.

- By ANNA MEDARIS

The year is 2045. Perhaps that makes you middle-aged, but people aren't calling it that anymore. Maybe we're measuring age internally—assessing your biological age based on the vitality of your cells, for example, not the number of candles on your birthday cake. Or we're gauging age by healthspan (years feeling fully alive), not lifespan (years being alive).

In a particularly gracious version of this future world, aging is supported by health-care professionals who take, and treat, women's pain seriously. While women outlive men by an average of 5.5 years, they tend to spend more of their lives in chronic pain, often as a result of age-related conditions such as osteoarthritis.

And when it comes to menopause, future doctors will (we hope) regularly and proactively offer hormone therapy and other yet-to-be-invented treatments, like implantable devices that detect and dispense said hormones. A future in which women have the knowledge and tools to continue living their best lives well into their 60s, 70s, and beyond? "That would be my wildest dream," says ob-gyn Jessica Shepherd, MD, author of Generation M: Living Well in Perimenopause and Menopause. "A lot of that has to do with how we treat our-selves—emotionally, nutrition, exercise—but also hormone replacement therapy, because it gives you the ability to have that longevity. Your body can thrive on it."

Of course, 2045 could look a lot more dire for women in the U.S. The climate crisis (a warming world disproportionately affects women's health, linking to issues such as preterm birth and worsened menopausal symptoms), stymied medical research (in early 2025, grant and funding freezes halted essential health-care research on things like endometriosis and cancer disparities), and reduced bodily autonomy (19 states have a full ban on or limited access to abortion since