Publications by authors named "M Karsai"

Article Synopsis
  • - The text discusses how socioeconomic status (SES) factors like income, ethnicity, and education influence social interactions and the transmission of infectious diseases, which are often overlooked in traditional epidemic models that focus mainly on age and interaction context.
  • - It introduces generalized contact matrices that account for multiple dimensions, demonstrating that neglecting these factors can result in an underestimation of the basic reproductive number of diseases.
  • - The research emphasizes the need to incorporate SES variables into epidemic models to better represent the dynamics of disease spread and to understand variations in behavior, such as differing adherence to health guidelines among various demographic groups.
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Representing social systems as networks, starting from the interactions between individuals, sheds light on the mechanisms governing their dynamics. However, networks encode only pairwise interactions, while most social interactions occur among groups of individuals, requiring higher-order network representations. Despite the recent interest in higher-order networks, little is known about the mechanisms that govern the formation and evolution of groups, and how people move between groups.

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Individuals' socio-demographic and economic characteristics crucially shape the spread of an epidemic by largely determining the exposure level to the virus and the severity of the disease for those who got infected. While the complex interplay between individual characteristics and epidemic dynamics is widely recognised, traditional mathematical models often overlook these factors. In this study, we examine two important aspects of human behaviour relevant to epidemics: contact patterns and vaccination uptake.

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Aims: Obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are major risk factors for cardiovascular (CV) diseases. Dysregulated pro-apoptotic ceramide synthesis reduces β-cell insulin secretion, thereby promoting hyperglycaemic states that may manifest as T2D. Pro-apoptotic ceramides modulate insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance while being linked to poor CV outcomes.

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Most children first enter social groups of peers in preschool. In this context, children use movement as a social tool, resulting in distinctive proximity patterns in space and synchrony with others over time. However, the social implications of children's movements with peers in space and time are difficult to determine due to the difficulty of acquiring reliable data during natural interactions.

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