About

Charles B. Eaton, known as Chuck, is a board-certified family physician and clinical epidemiologist with over 35 years of experience at Brown University. He serves as the Director of Primary Care and Prevention and is a Professor of Epidemiology and Family Medicine. His research focuses on various aspects of cardiovascular health, including biomarkers, cardiovascular epidemiology, and health disparities related to health equity. Eaton actively participates in teaching and mentoring medical students, residents, PhD candidates in Epidemiology, and postdoctoral fellows across multiple disciplines such as Cardiology, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Family Medicine. His work involves leading NIH-funded projects related to physical activity, nutrition, heart failure, coronary artery disease, lipids, osteoarthritis, diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, and obesity. Eaton's contributions include investigating the relationships between lifestyle factors, biomarkers, and disease outcomes, with a particular emphasis on underserved populations and health disparities. His research aims to improve understanding of disease mechanisms and inform prevention strategies, making significant contributions to the fields of epidemiology and primary care.

Research topics

• Endocrinology
• Genetics
• Internal medicine
• Pathology
• Medicine
• Biology
• Computational biology

Selected publications

• Identification of novel plasma proteomic biomarkers of Dupuytren disease

  PLoS ONE · 2026-03-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Dupuytren Disease (DD) is a chronic progressive disease that can cause disabling hand deformities. The most common treatments have either high complication rates or high early recurrence rates. Dupuytren lacks a staging biomarker profile to inform the development of preventive therapeutics to improve long-term outcomes. This multi-omic study aimed to create a DD blood proteomic biomarker profile by comparing DD plasma with that of a healthy control group. We measured circulating collagen metabolism peptides and found normal Collagen I synthesis but impaired Collagen I degradation in DD. We measured 6995 serum protein aptamers and identified 68 proteins that showed statistically significant differences compared with the control group. We developed two Diagnostic Proteomic Risk Scores (DPRS) based on hypothesis-free and hypothesis-based analyses. In independent data, our hypothesis-free and hypothesis-based DPRS distinguished Dupuytren from control subjects with accuracies of 76.5% and 70.6%, respectively. Our hypothesis-based DPRS also distinguished DD subjects with different disease progression rates by age at their first corrective procedure (p = 0.0018). This pilot study is the first to provide evidence to suggest that Collagen I accumulation in DD results from impaired degradation rather than increased collagen synthesis. It also describes novel DPRS that have potential use as diagnostic and staging biomarker panels for Dupuytren disease.

  PublisherDOI

• Abstract P1084: Association of Body Composition and Incident Heart Failure and Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction and Heart Failure with Reduced Ejection Fraction in postmenopausal women

  Circulation · 2025-03-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Background: As the US population ages, Heart Failure (HF) is reaching epidemic proportions, with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) placing a particular burden on elderly women. While the association of obesity with the risk of heart failure is well established, the role of visceral adiposity and other measures of body composition have had limited research. Methods: A cohort of 10,527 postmenopausal women, mean age 63.3 (7.4) at baseline had DXA measures of VAT area ( cm 2 ), SAT area (cm 2 ), VAT/SAT ratio, Fat mass(kg), Lean mass (kg), % body fat and BMI (kg/m 2 ) and were followed for 16.7 years with 852 cases of incident HF . A sub-cohort of 3528 women were followed for the same period were evaluated for adjudicated HFpEF and HFrEF with 116 cases of HFpEF and 107 cases of HFrEF. We evaluate the association of the above body composition variables using multiple variable cox proportional hazards models (see tables below) .We also evaluated a comprehensive model including all sociodemographic and lifestyle variables as well as potential confounders/mediators of medical co-morbidities. Results: Both quartile and continuous measures of VAT, SAT, VAT/SAT ratio, Fat mass, lean mass, and BMI were associated with increased risk of HF and HFpEF with stronger associations with HFpEF but not HFrEF in our main model. The comprehensive model including potential mediators showed persistent but diminished associations for VAT, VAT/SAT ratio, Fat mass, Lean mass, and BMI but not SAT or %body fat. Time varying measures of VAT, VAT/SAT ratio showed persistent and stronger associations than baseline measures for HF and HFpEF but not HFrEF. Competing risk models for death and HF subtype when evaluating HFpEF or HFrEF showed similar but slightly attenuated results. Conclusion: Visceral Fat and VAT/SAT ratio, Fat mass, and Lean mass are associated with increased risk of HF and HFpEF but not HFrEF in this cohort of elderly women. Whether new treatments for weight loss that reduce visceral fat will reduce the risk of HF and HFpEF is worthy of future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Walking for Exercise Prevents Greater Walking Difficulty - Data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative

  Osteoarthritis and Cartilage · 2025-04-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Safety of the PCSK9 inhibitor alirocumab: insights from 47 296 patient-years of observation

  European Heart Journal - Cardiovascular Pharmacotherapy · 2024 · 18 citations

  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Endocrinology

  The ODYSSEY OUTCOMES trial, comprising over 47 000 patient-years of placebo-controlled observation, demonstrated important reductions in the risk of recurrent ischaemic cardiovascular events with the monoclonal antibody to proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 alirocumab, as well as lower all-cause death. These benefits were observed in the context of substantial and persistent lowering of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol with alirocumab compared with that achieved with placebo. The safety profile of alirocumab was indistinguishable from matching placebo except for a ∼1.7% absolute increase in local injection site reactions. Further, the safety of alirocumab compared with placebo was evident in vulnerable groups identified before randomization, such as the elderly and those with diabetes mellitus, previous ischaemic stroke, or chronic kidney disease. The frequency of adverse events and laboratory-based abnormalities was generally similar to that in placebo-treated patients. Thus, alirocumab appears to be a safe and effective lipid-modifying treatment over a duration of at least 5 years.

  DOI

• Identification of novel plasma proteomic biomarkers of Dupuytren Disease

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2024-12-16 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Dupuytren Disease (DD) is a chronic progressive disease that can cause disabling hand deformities. The most common treatments have high rates of complications and early recurrence. Dupuytren lacks a staging biomarker profile to develop preventive therapeutics to improve long-term outcomes. This multi-omic study aimed to create a DD blood proteomic biomarker profile by comparing DD plasma to a healthy control group. We measured circulating collagen metabolism peptides and found normal Collagen I synthesis but impaired Collagen I degradation in DD. We measured 6995 serum protein aptamers and identified 68 proteins with statistically significant differences from the control group. We developed two Diagnostic Proteomic Risk Scores (DPRS) based on hypothesis-free and hypothesis-based analyses. In independent data, our hypothesis-free and hypothesis-based DPRS distinguished Dupuytren from control subjects with 76.5% and 70.6% accuracy, respectively. Our hypothesis-based DPRS also distinguished DD subjects with different disease progression rates based on subject age at the time of their first corrective procedure (p=0.0018). This pilot study is the first to provide evidence that Collagen I accumulation in DD is due to impaired degradation rather than increased collagen synthesis. It also describes novel DPRS that have potential use as diagnostic and staging biomarker panels for Dupuytren disease.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inflammatory Markers Involved in the Pathogenesis of Dupuytren's Contracture

  Critical Reviews in Eukaryotic Gene Expression · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  reviewSenior author

  Dupuytren's disease is a common fibroproliferative disease that can result in debilitating hand deformities. Partial correction and return of deformity are common with surgical or clinical treatments at present. While current treatments are limited to local procedures for relatively late effects of the disease, the pathophysiology of this connective tissue disorder is associated with both local and systemic processes (e.g., fibrosis, inflammation). Hence, a better understanding of the systemic circulation of Dupuytren related cytokines and growth factors may provide important insights into disease progression. In addition, systemic biomarker analysis could yield new concepts for treatments of Dupuytren that attenuate circulatory factors (e.g., anti-inflammatory agents, neutralizing antibodies). Progress in the development of any disease modifying biologic treatment for Dupuytren has been hampered by the lack of clinically useful biomarkers. The characterization of nonsurgical Dupuytren biomarkers will permit disease staging from diagnostic and prognostic perspectives, as well as allows evaluation of biologic responses to treatment. Identification of such markers may transcend their use in Dupuytren treatment, because fibrotic biological processes fundamental to Dupuytren are relevant to fibrosis in many other connective tissues and organs with collagen-based tissue compartments. There is a wide range of potential Dupuytren biomarker categories that could be informative, including disease determinants linked to genetics, collagen metabolism, as well as immunity and inflammation (e.g., cytokines, chemokines). This narrative review provides a broad overview of previous studies and emphasizes the importance of inflammatory mediators as candidate circulating biomarkers for monitoring Dupuytren's disease.

  PublisherDOI

• Whole genome sequence analysis of blood lipid levels in >66,000 individuals

  Nature Communications · 2022 · 73 citations

  • Genetics
  • Biology
  • Computational biology

  Blood lipids are heritable modifiable causal factors for coronary artery disease. Despite well-described monogenic and polygenic bases of dyslipidemia, limitations remain in discovery of lipid-associated alleles using whole genome sequencing (WGS), partly due to limited sample sizes, ancestral diversity, and interpretation of clinical significance. Among 66,329 ancestrally diverse (56% non-European) participants, we associate 428M variants from deep-coverage WGS with lipid levels; ~400M variants were not assessed in prior lipids genetic analyses. We find multiple lipid-related genes strongly associated with blood lipids through analysis of common and rare coding variants. We discover several associated rare non-coding variants, largely at Mendelian lipid genes. Notably, we observe rare LDLR intronic variants associated with markedly increased LDL-C, similar to rare LDLR exonic variants. In conclusion, we conducted a systematic whole genome scan for blood lipids expanding the alleles linked to lipids for multiple ancestries and characterize a clinically-relevant rare non-coding variant model for lipids.

  DOI

• Additional file 1 of DNAm-based signatures of accelerated aging and mortality in blood are associated with low renal function

  Open MIND · 2021-01-01

  dataset

  Additional file 1: Tables S1–S5 showing the results from all conducted analyses across renal parameters and DNAm-based predictors, providing both estimates from individual studies and meta-analyses.

  DOI

• Dupuytren Disease

  2021-12-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Association of Genetic Variants and Incident Coronary Heart Disease in Multiethnic Cohorts: The PAGE Study

  UNC Libraries · 2020-11-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Genome wide association studies identified several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with prevalent coronary heart disease (CHD) but less is known of associations with incident CHD. The association of thirteen published CHD SNPs was examined in five ancestry groups of four large US prospective cohorts.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey S. Berger

  New York University

  51 shared

• Wenjun Li

  Lanzhou University

  49 shared

• Matthew Allison

  University of California, San Diego

  49 shared

• Aaron K. Aragaki

  Fred Hutch Cancer Center

  49 shared

• Martha L. Daviglus

  49 shared

• Linda Van Horn

  Northwestern University

  49 shared

• Bert Reichert

  Nuremberg Hospital

  10 shared

• Lukas Prantl

  University Hospital Regensburg

  9 shared

Education

• Microsurgery fellowship, Microsurgery

  Bernard O'Brien Institute Of Microsurgery

  1990

• Hand Surgery Fellowship, Plastic Surgery

  New York University School of Medicine

  1989

• Plastic Surgery Residency, Plastic Surgery

  New York University School of Medicine

  1987

• General Surgery Residency, Surgery

  Boston University Medical Campus

  1985

• MD

  Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

  1980

• BS, Physics

  Emory University

  1976