older is used to restrict attention to a set of episodes ocurring at least a specified number of months prior to the current episode. For example, given the following case fragment:
01 Jun 03 20 Jun 03 30 Jun 03 15 Oct 03 02 Nov 03 HDL 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.5 1.9 LDL 6.2* 5.0* 3.5 3.9 Trig 3.0 1.9 LipidDrug N Y Y N
some (LDL older than 3 months) is high
average HDL older than 3 months >= 2.1