Highlighting Medical Breakthroughs

Another exciting advancement is the approval of checkpoint inhibitor drugs such as nivolumab, which allow your immune system to fight your own cancer. "These drugs are under rapid development, are becoming increasingly effective and can reverse the progress of the disease dramatically," Edelman says.

In the next five to 10 years, we will see breakthroughs for personalized medicine in all of lung disease. "We now understand that asthma is not one thing but a collection of things. We’ve identified telltale cells in your blood and sputum that indicate whether your asthma will respond to one drug or another," Edelman says. "So we have a new class of monoclonal antibody drugs that allows us to treat the 5 to 10 percent of people with persistent, hard-to-control asthma. We expect this sort of personalized medicine to extend to most other lung diseases." —Selene Yeager

Take it to heart

The discovery of PCSK9 inhibitors — a new class of injectable drugs that switch off one of the genes responsible for elevated cholesterol — was a blockbuster in the heart field, according to Steven Houser, research scientist and immediate past president of the American Heart Association. "For folks who have mutations in this pathway, this development is a godsend. The treatments are currently quite expensive, so use by the general public could be limited. But every company I know is working on drugs for that pathway. They’ll be here in the next five years, and this will have a big impact."

Regeneration is the holy grail of researchers who study cardiac injury and repair, Houser says. "Researchers are testing four or five different flavors of stem cells in preclinical models to see if they reduce the damage of a heart attack. If any of them do, people will fare way better following an incident. Scientists across the world are investigating stem cells to regenerate heart tissue. I’m pretty confident that in the next 10 years, we’ll have some regenerative therapies." —Selene Yeager

Another breakthrough for heart care could impact the hundreds of thousands of Americans who receive pacemakers for heart irregularities each year. Last year a new device called the Micra Transcatheter Pacing System was approved by the FDA. It reduces infection risks, is 93 percent smaller than a conventional pacemaker, is implanted into the heart muscle through a catheter and has no wires. —Sari Harrar

Self-donate stem cells

Bone marrow transplants could become easier to perform if doctors use a patient’s own blood stem cells. “Our goal is to make everyone’s cells amenable to self-donation,” says George Daley, a stem cell biologist and dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has grown the world’s first man-made human blood stem cells in his lab; these have the potential to grow into all kinds of blood cells. —Virginia Sole-Smith

Overcome allergies and immunodeficiency 

Biologics could be the way of the future for treating allergies. "Typically, we treat the symptoms of allergic diseases by targeting the elevated chemicals that cause them, like using antihistamines to lower histamine levels," Olajumoke O. Fadugba, M.D., director of the Allergy and Immunology Fellowship Training Program at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, tells AARP. "But now we can also use biologics — antibodies, such as Xolair, that block the molecules that cause the response. These are dramatically improving the lives of people with hard-to-treat allergic asthma, eczema and other allergic diseases."

In another five to 10 years, we could see breakthroughs in gene therapy for immunodeficiency diseases. "Currently we run a risk of curing one disease — the immunodeficiency — and inadvertently causing another — cancer. That technology will be better perfected in the years to come," Fadugba says. —Selene Yeager

The Quell device is a strap placed around the calf that uses electrical stimulation to treat pain.

Photographs by Craig Cutler

Conquer aches without drugs 

The cartilage in Joe Cleggett's hip joint had worn through, allowing bones to rub against each other. Seeking to hold off on hip-replacement surgery, the 73-year-old from Braintree, Massachusetts, tried a new device to treat the pain. Quell is a strap placed around the calf near the knee. By electrically stimulating a bundle of nerves there, it can relieve pain anywhere in the body. “It’s basically telling your brain, ‘You’re really not feeling this pain, so let it go,’ ” Cleggett says. —Denny Watkins

Companies are also developing pain remedies that use headsets to immerse people in virtual worlds. In clinical trials and studies, patients said they felt a 24 percent pain reduction while virtually throwing balls at animated bears and 60 percent less pain while floating through a wintry landscape and lobbing snowballs. For some, pain relief lasted a day after using the headset. —Lexi Pandell

Soothe digestion pain

There have been tremendous advances in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, according to Fabio Cominelli, M.D., director of the Digestive Health Research Institute at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "Biological therapies and new drugs provide improvement in quality of life and can put people in permanent remission. There may be 3 million people with IBD in the U.S., and it often occurs between ages 55 and 60."

Research into the gut microbiome has provided a host of possibilities, not only in digestive diseases but also in conditions such as asthma and diabetes. "We are studying how the gut can affect the brain, as well as how the intestine can affect skin diseases," Cominelli says. —Selene Yeager

Have healthy teeth for life

For those that dread the dentist's chair — have hope. "We are moving toward smart, multifunctional filling materials for cavities," Thomas Hart, D.D.S., director of the American Dental Association Foundation’s Volpe Research Center, tells AARP. "Instead of lasting eight to 10 years, as tooth-colored composite fillings currently do, they’ll last perhaps 30 years. They’ll also be self-healing, so if a filling crack develops, a little capsule of material will open to seal it. This may be available in as soon as five years." —Selene Yeager