All Sauce from Weekly Sauce:

It’s not just bumper-to-bumper highway traffic that’s causing your blood pressure to spike during your daily commute. New research shows that the exhaust fumes spewing from all those vehicles triggers a significant increase in car passengers’ blood pressure. The observed increase is comparable to the effect of a high-salt diet, researchers found, and the effect…  read on >  read on >

Alzheimer’s patients are notoriously irritable, agitated and anxious – and researchers now think they know why. Brain inflammation appears to influence the mood problems of Alzheimer’s patients, rather than traditional markers of the disease like amyloid beta or tau proteins, researchers report in the Nov. 27 issue of the journal JAMA Network Open. Brain inflammation…  read on >  read on >

The world is being flooded with internet-driven misinformation, but there are ways to counter fake news with the facts, a new report says. These include aggressive fact-checking, preemptively debunking lies before they take root and nudging people to be more skeptical before sharing information, the American Psychological Association analysis found. The product of more than…  read on >  read on >

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 29, 2023 (Healthday News) — Your neck muscles could be giving you headaches, claims new German research that used special MRI scans to spot the connection. “Our imaging approach provides [the] first objective evidence for the very frequent involvement of the neck muscles in primary headaches, such as neck pain in migraine or…  read on >  read on >

TUESDAY, Nov. 28, 2023 (Healthday News) — The prevalence of a highly mutated COVID variant has tripled in the past two weeks, new government data shows. Now, nearly 1 in 10 new COVID cases are fueled by the BA.2.86 variant, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday. The variant is spreading the fastest in…  read on >  read on >

It might seem that surfing the web could cause a person’s mental health to suffer, but a landmark new study has concluded that internet use poses no major threat to people’s psychological well-being. Researchers compared country-level internet and broadband use to the mental well-being of millions of people in dozens of countries, and came away…  read on >  read on >

COVID vaccines saved the lives and health of countless babies by preventing their premature births, a new study shows. COVID-19 initially caused an alarming surge in premature birth rates, but those returned to pre-pandemic levels following the introduction of vaccines, researchers found. These findings should help allay vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women, said researcher Jenna…  read on >  read on >

Folks who smoke weed along with cigarettes are doing serious damage to their lungs, a new study warns. People who do both are 12 times more likely to develop emphysema than nonsmokers, due to the damage they’re doing to the lung’s air sacs, researchers report. “There is a common public misconception that marijuana smoking is…  read on >  read on >