A new grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) will support the development of advanced statistical methods to better understand how dental caries and periodontal disease are related at the individual level.

The study, “Assessing marginal associations between dental caries and periodontal diseases and their determinants in cross-sectional studies,” is an R03 award designed to support smaller research projects. The research will use data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to explore how factors such as sex, race, income, education, and smoking status influence the observed associations between these two common oral diseases.

Steven Levy, the Wright-Bush-Shreves Endowed Professor of Research, and Shaoping Zhang, associate professor in the Department of Periodontics, are contributing to the project from the University of Iowa College of Dentistry. Levy and Zhang will provide expertise in interpreting caries and periodontal data, and they will work with colleagues at other institutions to analyze and report on what the data reveals.

The study is led by Somnath Datta, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, and Bruce Dye, professor and chair of the Department of Community Dentistry and Population Health at the University of Colorado is a co-investigators along with Levy and Zhang.

In addition to generating new insights into oral health, the project will produce a publicly available R software package to help researchers apply these novel statistical methods to their own data. This work aims to improve how scientists analyze complex oral health data and ultimately inform strategies to prevent disease and improve patient outcomes.

Research reported on this website is being supported by the NIDCR under Award Number 1R03DE033774-01A1. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIDCR.