India's longevity boom must stop treating women as an afterthought

Walk through most preventive health protocols today, the panels, the risk scores, the reference ranges used to flag what counts as normal, and a lot of it traces back to studies built predominantly on male cohorts. Add midlife women into that picture and the gaps widen. A woman in her forties reporting fatigue, brain fog, joint pain or disrupted sleep often finds that standard panels do not fully capture what she is experiencing, and the hormonal driver behind it can go unexamined. She sits in an uncomfortable middle: too complex for general wellness, not quite a fit for gynaecology, which is usually built around fertility and reproductive years rather than the decade of hormonal transition that follows.That is a real gap, and worth naming clearly.