Ryan Ruff
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Tooth decay is the most common noncommunicable disease in the world and the most common chronic disease of childhood, and it falls hardest on low-income children in both cities and rural areas. Untreated cavities interfere with eating, sleeping, learning and social life.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Education Research
- Topics
dental caries
tooth decay
silver diamine fluoride
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Quantify the long-term caries-arresting effect of school-based silver diamine fluoride using CariedAway trial data, including the added benefit of repeat application and whether treating posterior teeth lowers new decay in anterior teeth.
- Estimate transition probabilities for individual tooth surfaces moving between sound, carious and arrested states after silver diamine fluoride treatment in a school-based program.
- Estimate surface-level caries risk following silver diamine fluoride treatment as modified by baseline disease severity, using semi-parametric G-estimation to account for the interval-censored examination schedule of school-based care.
- Measure the total treatment time required to deliver silver diamine fluoride in a school program and compare it with the time needed for dental sealants and atraumatic restorations.
More about the research
Bringing prevention into schools is one way to reach children who otherwise do not see a dentist, and this work analyzes data from a large school-based trial to figure out how such programs should be designed and staffed.
Why it matters
Many low-income children never reach a dental office, and school programs are limited by cost and the supply of dental professionals. Evidence on how often silver diamine fluoride must be reapplied, how much it reduces surface-level decay risk, and how much staff time it takes compared with sealants would let school districts and health agencies design programs that treat more children with the personnel and budgets they already have.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zezhang Wen
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-New Orleans, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify the transcriptional and post-transcriptional factors that control expression of brpA, a gene needed for biofilm formation in Streptococcus mutans, using molecular, biochemical and bioinformatics approaches.
Benjamin Chaffee
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine how socioeconomic stressors in early adulthood affect oral health over time in a cohort of 4,000 diverse first-year college students, and whether effects differ by race/ethnicity and gender.
Erliang Zeng
University of Iowa, IA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether a Self-Determination Theory-based intervention keeps or restores a healthy oral microbial community in children from birth to age three, by comparing oral metagenomes between intervention and control groups from a completed clinical trial.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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