227 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 finds that lifting COVID-19 containment policies in the US during the first year of the pandemic produced immediate but transient reductions in psychological distress, suggesting that extended policies were not the primary driver of persistent mental health declines during that period.
This ecological analysis of U.S. state-level data reveals that while SARS-CoV-2 incidence, hospitalization rates, and multimorbidity vary across regions, only higher vaccine coverage and greater infection incidence are independently associated with Long COVID prevalence, highlighting vaccination as a critical factor in mitigating long-term impacts.
This paper proposes an E-value-informed sensitivity analysis framework with a data-driven benchmark and operational decision rule to assess and safeguard the validity of hybrid controlled trials against unmeasured confounding, thereby enabling robust inference while preserving the statistical power gains from incorporating real-world data.
This study found that lower alcohol prices per standard drink are associated with increased alcohol-related harms and risky consumption, particularly among structurally disadvantaged groups in British Columbia, suggesting that minimum unit pricing could effectively promote health equity.
This paper presents a lightweight, statistically rigorous bootstrap particle filter framework that integrates wastewater, case incidence, and serological data within a state-space model to accurately infer and forecast time-varying effective reproduction numbers (Rt) while overcoming challenges related to missing data, irregular sampling, and parameter unidentifiability.
Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this research demonstrates that both the frequency and diversity of arts engagement and physical activity are associated with slower epigenetic ageing, with comparable effect sizes between the two activities, particularly among middle-aged and older adults.
This modeling study demonstrates that in rural African settings with multiple vector species, preferentially targeting larviciding efforts against the dominant malaria vector (Anopheles funestus) yields substantial epidemiological impact and greater resource efficiency compared to broader, species-agnostic broadcast approaches.
This prospective cohort study of the 1946 British birth cohort found no significant associations between serological measures of common infections and Alzheimer's disease neuropathology (plasma p-tau217 and A{beta}-PET status), suggesting that exposure to these pathogens does not directly drive core AD pathology, though potential interactions with APOE {varepsilon}4 carriage and education warrant further investigation.
The second season of Italy's Influcast collaborative forecasting hub demonstrated that ensemble models integrating virological data into influenza-like illness targets significantly outperform baseline and individual models, highlighting the value of combining syndromic and virological surveillance for more reliable epidemic forecasting.
This population-level study reveals that while chronic absenteeism in Canadian kindergarten classes more than doubled following the COVID-19 pandemic, the traditional link between absenteeism and developmental vulnerability weakened, likely due to a demographic shift where children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds became more frequently absent.