228 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 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.
Using data from the NLSY79, HRS, and a synthetic cohort, this study found no significant association between early-to-middle adulthood alcohol consumption (including abstention, light/moderate, or heavy drinking) and mid-to-late life memory performance, suggesting that alcohol's effects on cognition may not manifest until later in life.
This time series regression study analyzes over 9.9 million ICU cases in Germany from 2009 to 2023 to demonstrate that atmospheric factors, particularly pressure-related variables, temperature, and ozone, significantly influence daily intensive care demand with distinct variations across age, sex, and disease types, thereby providing evidence to help the healthcare system anticipate and prepare for short-term meteorological impacts.
This study demonstrates that anti-gSG6-P1 IgG antibodies against Anopheles salivary proteins can serve as informative surrogate outcome measures for evaluating topical repellent effectiveness in Southeast Myanmar, particularly showing reduced antibody levels among high-risk migrant and forest-dwelling populations six months after intervention rollout.
This study utilizes the Generation Scotland cohort to link long-term air pollution exposure with increased risks of dementia and myocardial infarction, while identifying specific molecular fingerprints in DNA methylation and proteins that mediate these health outcomes and accelerate epigenetic aging.
This study analyzes 177 multistate animal-contact Nontyphoidal Salmonella outbreaks in the U.S. from 2009 to 2022 using network and machine learning methods to identify distinct transmission clusters driven by specific serovars, animal sources (particularly birds and reptiles), and settings, thereby highlighting the need for region-specific One Health prevention strategies.
This study utilizes wavelet analysis to reveal heterogeneous climate-malaria dynamics between Nigeria's low-burden Lagos and high-burden Zamfara states, demonstrating that while Zamfara exhibits strong, predictable annual cycles with specific rainfall and temperature lags suitable for climate-adaptive intervention timing, Lagos shows irregular transmission patterns, thereby underscoring the critical need for region-specific, climate-resilient malaria control strategies rather than generalized national approaches.
By integrating plasma proteomics and metabolomics data from approximately 20,000 UK Biobank participants, this study identifies coordinated multi-omics modules—dominated by immune-inflammatory activation with metabolic support—that characterize accelerated PhenoAge and offer enhanced biological interpretability beyond single-omics analyses.
This paper outlines the current status, prerequisites, and implementation challenges of automated outbreak detection systems across the EU and UK, revealing that while demand and data availability are high, adoption is hindered by funding and IT constraints, suggesting that EU-funded collaborative capacity building could enable the development of a shared, sustainable solution.
This cohort study of 13,266 low-income patients in Brazil reveals that in-hospital AIDS-related mortality is significantly driven by social determinants of health, including older age, male sex, Black or Brown race, lower household wealth, illiteracy, and residence in the structurally disadvantaged North region, underscoring the critical need for targeted social policies to address these structural inequities.