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Understanding Recurrent Disease: A Dynamical Systems Approach, Wenjing Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recurrent disease, characterized by repeated alternations between acute relapse and long re- mission, can be a feature of both common diseases, like ear infections, and serious chronic diseases, such as HIV infection or multiple sclerosis. Due to their poorly understood etiology and the resultant challenge for medical treatment and patient management, recurrent diseases attract much attention in clinical research and biomathematics. Previous studies of recurrence by biomathematicians mainly focus on in-host models and generate recurrent patterns by in- corporating forcing functions or stochastic elements. In this study, we investigate deterministic in-host models through the qualitative analysis of dynamical systems, to …