Jeong Hoon Jang
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Mathematics & Statistics
Bisphosphonates are widely prescribed drugs that strengthen bone. Older adults with osteoporosis or with cancer that has spread to bone take them often.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
osteonecrosis of the jaw
bisphosphonates
osteoporosis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Estimate how much bisphosphonate use affects jaw osteonecrosis risk directly and how much works through dental care, using new causal mediation methods applied to Texas Medicare and SEER-Medicare records.
- Extend marginal structural models and the parametric mediational g-formula, methods for estimating causal effects from observational data, to handle drug exposure and dental care that change over time and the competing risk of death.
- Build and validate a dynamic model that updates a patient's ONJ risk over time from frailty, comorbidity, treatment duration and dental procedures, using joint modeling of repeated measures and survival outcomes.
- Identify time windows of highest ONJ risk after starting bisphosphonates by assessing the prediction model with time-dependent ROC curves and AUC, measures of how well it separates high- from low-risk patients.
More about the research
In rare cases they cause osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ), a painful condition in which jawbone dies, becomes exposed and stays infected. This leaves doctors in a bind. Stopping the drug can raise fracture risk or let cancer progress, while continuing it can raise ONJ risk. Guidelines recommend thorough dental care during treatment, but that advice rests mostly on observational data that may be biased. No one yet knows whether, when or how specific dental care actually lowers ONJ risk.
Why it matters
Older adults taking bisphosphonates for osteoporosis or bone-spreading cancer could benefit if doctors and dentists know which dental care truly lowers jaw osteonecrosis risk. The project aims to give clinicians validated causal evidence and easy-to-use, real-time risk tools. These could guide individual choices, such as adjusting the drug schedule or prioritizing dental procedures, so patients keep the bone benefits of the drug with less jaw risk.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hong Zhu
University of Virginia, VA·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop a copula-based model, a statistical tool that links the timing of two related events, with time-varying effects and random effects, for clustered semi-competing risks data such as cancer recurrence and death.
Xianglin Du
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine trends in the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias from 1991 to 2020 among Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 or older, and how prevalence varies by state, region, age, gender, race/ethnicity and other conditions.
Caroline Thompson
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Quantify how often cancer is first diagnosed in the emergency department across 15 cancer types in SEER-Medicare records for 1.8 million Americans, and measure disparities by socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and geographic isolation.
The school
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston: 14 labs on PI Pages, $241M a year on research, 141 research doctorates a year.
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