ArticleeLife2017
Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods.
Article in eLife, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Graph-structured populations elucidate the role of deleterious mutations in long-term evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Spectral dynamics of guided edge removals and identifying transient amplifiers for death-Birth updating.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Categorizing update mechanisms for graph-structured metapopulations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Martingales and the fixation time of evolutionary graphs with arbitrary dimensionality.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Quantifying the rise and fall of scientific fields.PloS one · 2022Article
- Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 Infection Risk Within the Google/Apple Exposure Notification Framework to Inform Quarantine Recommendations.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2022Article
- Martingales and the characteristic functions of absorption time on bipartite graphs.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Spectral analysis of transient amplifiers for death-birth updating constructed from regular graphs.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- Fixation probabilities in graph-structured populations under weak selection.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- "Stay nearby or get checked": A Covid-19 control strategy.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2021Article
- Stationary log-normal distribution of weights stems from spontaneous ordering in adaptive node networks.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The reachability of contagion in temporal contact networks: how disease latency can exploit the rhythm of human behavior.BMC infectious diseases · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The incubation period for typhoid, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases follows a right-skewed, approximately lognormal distribution. Although this pattern was discovered more than sixty years ago, it remains an open question to explain its ubiquity. Here, we propose an explanation based on evolutionary dynamics on graphs. For simple models of a mutant or pathogen invading a network-structured population of healthy cells, we show that skewed distributions of incubation periods emerge for a wide range of assumptions about invader fitness, competition dynamics, and network structure. The skewness stems from stochastic mechanisms associated with two classic problems in probability theory: the coupon collector and the random walk. Unlike previous explanations that rely crucially on heterogeneity, our results hold even for homogeneous populations. Thus, we predict that two equally healthy individuals subjected to equal doses of equally pathogenic agents may, by chance alone, show remarkably different time courses of disease.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.