I picked up a lot of thought-provoking tidbits at the American Geriatrics Society’s annual scientific meeting in Seattle this month, and I plan to pass some of them along. Herewith, my first report, focusing on a perennial New Old Age conundrum: seniors and driving.

The common perception, Dr. Richard Marottoli, a Yale geriatrician, told me in an interview, is that most older drivers eventually put away the car keys (or have them wrested away) — and that’s the end of it. In reality, as his new study shows, “there are stops and starts and sputters.”

Dr. Marottoli and his co-authors followed more than 600 older drivers in Connecticut, checking on them by phone every six months. They were mostly men (probably because many were approached through a Veterans Affairs health center), with an average age of almost 79, who drove an average of 129 miles weekly. In fact, more than 70 percent drove daily.

A series of tests showed that while most had multiple chronic conditions, “it’s a pretty active, healthy group,” Dr. Marottoli said.

Over two years, 11 percent of the group stopped driving. But! More than a third of those resumed at some point. Those who returned to driving were healthier and more functional than those who didn’t.

Maybe, Dr. Marottoli hypothesized, they’d had an injury or illness, relinquished the wheel while they recovered, then continued as before. Or maybe, I speculated, they intended to stop, found that transportation alternatives were inconvenient or nonexistent, so went back on the road.

The study, reported at the conference but not yet published, doesn’t address why people stopped or why they resumed. (And the stoppers constitute a small sample, so we don’t know how representative they are of drivers or former drivers.) But the Yale group is investigating those matters next.

Meanwhile, Dr. Marottoli concluded, “it’s less simple than we think.” Not that we ever thought it was simple.