Older Athletes Attract Researchers’ Eye

After decades of studying the performance of youthful athletes, health researchers are turning their attention to an older crowd, using the Senior Olympics as their laboratory. This story in the  Boston Globe reports that what scientists do know about senior athletes suggests that the decline in performance from ages 50 to 75 is fairly meager.  For example, the speed of one-mile runners fell about 2 percent each year from ages 50 to 75. Then from 75 to 85, their speeds dropped by about 7 percent a year.  Why the sudden interest in aging athletes? The Globe reports that today, about 12 percent of Americans are age 65 or older, but by 2050 they’ll make up 21 percent of the population.