407 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 target trial emulation study in Pakistan demonstrates that intravenous iron treatment for pregnant women with anaemia significantly reduces the risk of moderate-to-severe anaemia and is associated with an 83% reduction in stillbirth risk compared to no treatment.
This synthetic control study finds that London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) had minimal and often negligible impacts on both PM2.5 air pollution levels and respiratory medication prescribing across its three implementation stages, suggesting that the policy's health benefits are considerably smaller than previously reported.
This study utilizes New Zealand's comprehensive national insurance data from 2015 to 2024 to reveal a rising trend in knee injuries, highlighting significant demographic variations and underscoring the need for broader epidemiological research beyond the traditional focus on cruciate ligament injuries.
This convergent mixed-methods study in Zambia reveals that SARS-CoV-2 infection disparities across rural, peri-urban, and urban settings are driven primarily by demographic, behavioral, and health-system factors rather than geographic residence alone, underscoring the need for context-specific prevention strategies and equitable access to testing and vaccines.
This paper presents the Rio de Janeiro Heat Dashboard, a real-time R/Shiny surveillance system that integrates climatic and health data to monitor heat exposure, classify alert levels, and track health impacts as a core component of Brazil's first municipal heat protocol.
This study of two generations in a UK cohort reveals that socioeconomic disadvantage and adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with increased odds of various menstrual symptoms, including pain, irregular cycles, and bleeding disorders, indicating that these health issues disproportionately affect socially and economically disadvantaged women.
This study demonstrates that wastewater treatment plants effectively serve as sentinel sites for monitoring infectious disease dynamics in surrounding off-network populations, with mobility-defined communities offering a superior framework for assessing representativeness compared to traditional administrative boundaries.
This study of Ontario infants found that while maternal immunity is crucial for individual protection, incorporating time-varying maternal immunity did not improve model predictions of post-pandemic RSV resurgence, indicating that shifts in population-level contact patterns were the primary drivers of the observed transmission dynamics.
Using data from the 1958 British birth cohort, this study demonstrates that while mid-life weight gain into obesity accelerates cardiometabolic decline, losing weight from obesity in later midlife can restore cardiometabolic health trajectories to levels comparable to those of individuals with a healthy weight.
This study demonstrates that participatory digital surveillance using InfluenzaNet data can generate valid, longitudinal social contact matrices linked with health and demographic information, establishing a scalable foundation for a European social contact observatory to support epidemic modeling and public health preparedness.