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Dr. Jeremy Gaskins uses novel methods to analyze multi-year oral health data
Jeremy Gaskins, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, will lead a detailed statistical examination of caries (tooth decay) and fluorosis data available from the Iowa Fluoride Study (IFS). The research study, funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) awarded to the University of Florida, will integrate multi-year data to uncover new information that are undetectable using the simpler approaches previously undertaken for the IFS data. The aims of the project are to provide a greater understanding of the risk and preventative factors of tooth decay and fluorosis as well as contribute to biostatistics methodological research of statistical regression models for count data.
Dr. Gaskins will develop novel statistical models for temporal and statistically correlated count data to analyze tooth-level data using a Bayesian formulation. The IFS is an ongoing study of a cohort of Iowa children that began in 1991, led by Dr. Steven Levy. As such, the resulting dataset is a potential source of valuable information. It is anticipated that, through innovative and efficient statistical modeling, it will be possible to mine these data more fully and discover novel relationships between caries incidences/severity and various potential risk and preventive factors and study their short- and long-term effects. The study will also examine data on dental fluorosis collected on the same subjects using a statistical model developed for ordinal temporal data. It is anticipated that, overall, we will be able to determine the preventive factors for dental caries which are not detrimental from the standpoint of fluorosis development.
Sept. 10, 2018
