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Spending hours each day online via either mobile devices or the stationary kind is not a mental illness. In fact, the original proposal, by the late Dr. Ivan Goldberg, was meant as a joke. More than any other behavior that people engage in compulsively, the digital version — from checking Facebook to texting — shows that just because you’re compulsive about something doesn’t mean you have a broken brain. To the contrary. As with other compulsions that fall well short of pathology, the allure of being online sheds light on some of the mind’s most salient, and utterly normal, operations, according to the latest research. (Begley, 2/8)

A widely used blood test to measure blood-sugar trends can give imprecise results, depending on a person's race and other factors. This test means diabetes can sometimes be misdiagnosed or managed poorly. Doctors have been cautioned before that results from the A1C test don't have pinpoint accuracy. A study published Tuesday underscores that shortcoming as it applies to people who carry the sickle cell trait. (Harris, 2/7)

Forty million American adults have lost some hearing because of noise, and half of them suffered the damage outside the workplace, from everyday exposure to leaf blowers, sirens, rock concerts and other loud sounds, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. A quarter of people ages 20 to 69 were suffering some hearing deficits, the CDC reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, even though the vast majority of the people in the study claimed to have good or excellent hearing. (Bernstein, 2/7)

Surgical devices that can spread deadly uterine cancers were on the market for 22 years before a U.S. Food and Drug Administration system designed to catch such problems alerted the agency, a new watchdog report set for release soon confirmed. The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office also said the FDA was aware of the potential cancer-spreading risk with laparoscopic power morcellators from the moment the agency first approved one in 1991, and that a series of medical-journal articles dating back to 1980 highlighted this risk. But the FDA believed there was a low risk of unsuspected cancers that could spread, according to the GAO. (Levitz and Kamp, 2/7)