Turns Out It's More Than a Number: "... More older people than ever seem to lead healthy lives, engaged in a full range of activities....".

• Author: Mineo, Liz
• Position: HEALTH BEAT

AT 81, Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, is as busy as ever. The Jamaica-bom scholar of slavery and issues of race recently delivered a 340-page report on education reform in the island nation to Prime Minister Andrew Holness as he geared up to teach two spring courses: a workshop on culture, history, and society, and a class on human trafficking and slavery. He did all of that while advising numerous graduate students, taking care of several administrative duties in his department, and parenting his 17-year-old daughter Kaia with his wife of 26 years, Anita Goldman.

Patterson does not plan on backing off his schedule any time soon, and he is not alone among growing numbers of his cohort. He is part of a major demographic transformation driven by life expectancy and "health span," the length of time a person is healthy.

"... Health span has increased," says Olivia I. Okereke, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and associate professor of epidemiology. "As a result, more older people than ever seem to lead healthy lives, engaged in a full range of activities--including in business, science, politics, and cultural and civic life."

Patterson believes remaining healthy and active is something of a chicken-or-egg proposition. "In my view, the more you work and the more goals you set to achieve, the better it is for your health. Interacting with people, dealing with people's expectations of you and your reaction to those expectations, the working, and the thinking, are part of staying alive in a way that makes life meaningful for me. I wouldn't want to give that up."

According to the U.S. Census, the country's population aged 65 years and older has grown rapidly since 2010 due to the aging of baby boomers, those born between 1946-64. With older people living longer and healthier lives, their share of the population has doubled in the past 50 years.

It is a phenomenon that not only personnel in the medical field have noticed. In the past two years, two octogenarians helped lead the country amid the COVID pandemic and the political controversy surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot: Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Both were bom in 1940. Other top leaders are not far behind: Pres. Joe Biden will be 80 in November and Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, turned 80 in February...