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Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first core laboratory test that can screen for two biomarkers associated with brain injury, known as GFAP and UCH-L1. The new test, developed by Abbott and used for mild traumatic brain injury patients in people 18 and older within 12 hours of injury, can deliver results in 18 minutes. (Beth McQuiston, 2/9)

In January 2023, minutes after Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field following a tackle, my cellphone was humming with a steady stream of messages from friends, family, and acquaintances who had been watching the game. How could this happen, they wanted to know. Could a single, seemingly routine collision between two very-large men really cause one of their hearts to abruptly stop beating? It could, and it had, I found myself explaining to the non-physicians in my social orbit over the next few days as Hamlin remained on ventilator support in the ICU. (Adina Wise, 2/9)

Joe Biden is old. Like each of us, he comes from a particular place in history, in his case the LBJ years. And that’s one big reason why his first term has been so full of accomplishment: His age, often cited as the greatest obstacle to his reelection, is actually his superpower. There was never much question that Third Act, the progressive organizing group for people over 60 that I helped found, would end up endorsing President Biden for reelection. We campaign to protect our climate and our democracy, and so the chances we would back Donald Trump — who pulled us out of the Paris climate accords and helped mount the Jan. 6 insurrection — were nil. (Nikki Haley, another no-go, strenuously backed Trump’s Paris pullout.) (McKibben, 2/9)

Country music legend Toby Keith battled stomach cancer, a rare and often-fatal form of the disease, for two years before losing his fight this week. Keith was, of course, a 62-year-old white male, but his death from a form of cancer that disproportionately affects people of color highlights the need to funnel more charitable dollars toward this underfunded area of oncological research. (Carolyn Bolton, 2/9)

Despite widespread promises of reform after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, in 2023, police killed at least 1,246 people — the most in more than a decade. This police violence is intertwined with a parallel public policy disaster: America’s abysmal mental health systems that force police officers to function as de facto mental health workers. People with unmet mental health needs are 16 times more likely to be killed by police, and a quarter of all those killed by police since 2015 were perceived to be suffering from a mental health crisis. (Eric Reinhart, 2/8)

As former U.S. surgeons general, we call on the Biden administration to immediately finalize Food and Drug Administration rules that will prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. (Regina Benjamin and Jerome Adams, 2/9)