286 papers
Epidemiology is the study of how diseases spread through populations and what factors influence their patterns. Rather than focusing on individual patients, this field examines broader trends to identify outbreaks, track transmission, and guide public health decisions. By analyzing data on infection rates and risk factors, researchers work to prevent future health crises and protect communities worldwide.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from medRxiv to make these critical findings instantly accessible. For each study, we provide both a plain-language explanation for general readers and a detailed technical summary for specialists. This dual approach ensures that vital insights into disease dynamics are understood clearly and quickly by everyone who needs them.
Explore the latest research below to see how scientists are currently mapping disease trends and developing strategies to safeguard global health.
This study of U.S. outpatient influenza cases from 2023–2025 reveals that oseltamivir initiation rates were suboptimal even among high-risk individuals, with treatment completion being particularly low among young children and overall only reaching 42% of those who started the medication.
This paper introduces a generalized mathematical model that combines demographic contact matrices and individual contact variability to derive a more accurate formula for the basic reproduction number, which, when applied to Belgian COVID-19 contact data, yields higher estimates and reveals larger fluctuations in transmission potential compared to existing approaches.
This retrospective study of 35,581 RDT-confirmed dengue cases in Coxs Bazar (2021–2024) reveals a large-scale, sustained upsurge predominantly affecting Rohingya refugees, characterized by seasonal peaks, high pediatric burden, and specific predictors of severe disease, underscoring the urgent need to shift from episodic outbreak responses to integrated, long-term preparedness strategies in humanitarian settings.
This study demonstrates that divergent results in bi-directional sibling analyses of prenatal acetaminophen are often predictable artifacts of unadjustable parity confounding rather than evidence of carryover effects, suggesting that total sibling models adjusted for parity remain robust.
This study utilizes a stochastic multi-strain epidemic model to demonstrate that while transmission-advantaged variants dominate early and predictably, immune-evasion variants often remain undetected until population immunity reaches a critical threshold, with realistic contact network structures further driving punctuated evolutionary dynamics.
This study characterizes 82 MPXV clade I cases in the WHO European Region from August 2024 to November 2025, revealing a shift from imported infections to emerging autochthonous transmission among men who have sex with men, which underscores the need for intensified surveillance to prevent sustained spread.
This cross-sectional study of 1,116 adults in Qatar's primary care system reveals that nearly half are at high risk for prediabetes according to the PRISQ tool, with age, BMI, waist circumference, and blood pressure identified as the strongest independent predictors of elevated risk scores.
This cross-sectional study of the 2022–2023 cholera outbreak in Malawi demonstrates that a single-dose oral cholera vaccination campaign was highly effective, reducing infection risk by 98%, lowering the odds of severe dehydration by 50%, and significantly decreasing the case fatality rate from 2.80% among unvaccinated individuals to 1.20% among vaccinated individuals.
A descriptive analysis of Italian electronic health records from 2012 to 2024 reveals a dramatic increase in monoclonal antibody dispensing for women of reproductive age and a corresponding rise in continued use during pregnancy, suggesting a shift in prescribing practices despite a significant proportion of women still discontinuing treatment upon conception.
This study analyzes 20 years of mortality data in Greece to demonstrate that heatwaves consistently increase death rates, particularly among the elderly and females, with over half of these heat-related deaths attributable to human-induced climate change and little evidence of population-level adaptation.