About

Eliseo Guallar is an epidemiologist whose research focuses on the study of cardiovascular disease epidemiology and prevention, with an emphasis on evaluating the role of environmental and nutritional exposures in the development of cardiovascular disease. His work has contributed critically and innovatively to understanding risk factors for chronic disease both in the US and globally. He has published seminal articles and is a leading figure in an emerging field highlighting the risks of exposure to levels of metals previously considered safe for cardiovascular health. In addition to his work in toxic metals, Dr. Guallar has made important contributions to understanding the effects of certain micronutrients and vitamin supplements on cardiovascular disease risk and outcomes, influencing consumer habits and attitudes towards these products. Much of his research has been funded by prominent institutions including the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the American Heart Association, and the CDC.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Pathology
• Biology
• Computational biology
• Bioinformatics
• Internal medicine
• Genetics
• Family medicine
• Medical physics

Selected publications

• Discontinuation of Beta-Blocker Therapy after Myocardial Infarction

  New England Journal of Medicine · 2026-03-30 · 2 citations

  article

  BACKGROUND: The role of long-term beta-blocker therapy after a myocardial infarction in patients without left ventricular systolic dysfunction or heart failure is unclear in the era of contemporary coronary-artery reperfusion and secondary prevention interventions. METHODS: We conducted an open-label, randomized, noninferiority trial at 25 centers in South Korea. Patients whose condition remained stable after a myocardial infarction, who had a left ventricular ejection fraction of at least 40% and no heart failure, and who had received beta-blocker therapy for at least 1 year after the myocardial infarction were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to discontinue or to continue beta-blocker therapy. The primary end point was a composite of death from any cause, recurrent myocardial infarction, or hospitalization for heart failure. The prespecified noninferiority margin was an upper limit of the 95% confidence interval for the hazard ratio of 1.4. RESULTS: A total of 2540 patients underwent randomization; 1246 were assigned to beta-blocker discontinuation and 1294 to beta-blocker continuation. The mean age of the patients was 63.2 years, and 12.8% were women. At a median follow-up of 3.1 years (interquartile range, 2.5 to 3.5), a primary end-point event had occurred in 58 patients (4-year Kaplan-Meier estimate, 7.2%) in the discontinuation group and in 74 patients (4-year Kaplan-Meier estimate, 9.0%) in the continuation group (hazard ratio, 0.80; 95% confidence interval, 0.57 to 1.13; P = 0.001 for noninferiority). The incidence of serious adverse events was similar in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients who received beta-blocker therapy beyond the first year after a myocardial infarction, discontinuation of beta-blocker therapy was noninferior to continuation with respect to a composite of death from any cause, recurrent myocardial infarction, or hospitalization for heart failure. (Funded by Patient-Centered Clinical Research Coordinating Center in the Ministry of Health and Welfare, South Korea; SMART-DECISION ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04769362.).

  PublisherDOI

• Mitochondrial heteroplasmy is a risk factor for the development of chronic lymphocytic leukemia

  Nature Communications · 2026-02-18 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) can arise from lymphoid clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (L-CHIP), but many individuals who develop CLL lack detectable L-CHIP prior to diagnosis. To identify additional predictors of CLL risk, we analyze mitochondrial heteroplasmy in 419,154 individuals from the UK Biobank (UKB). Heteroplasmy is associated with a 1.5-fold increased risk of developing CLL, and this risk rises to 4-fold when accounting for deleterious heteroplasmic variants. These findings are confirmed in an independent cohort, the All of Us Research Program (AoU). Notably, the associations remain significant even in the absence of L-CHIP, highlighting heteroplasmy's potential utility as an independent biomarker. Moreover, heteroplasmy is enriched in individuals with high-risk L-CHIP genotypes and large clonal burden, suggesting a potential biological role in malignant transformation. Here, we show that mitochondrial heteroplasmy, especially functionally deleterious variants, identifies individuals at increased risk of CLL who would otherwise go undetected by L-CHIP-based assessments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Erratum: “Long-Term Air Pollution Exposure and Mitochondrial DNA Copy Number: An Analysis of UK Biobank Data”

  Environmental Health Perspectives · 2025-05-01

  erratumOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reporting guideline for chatbot health advice studies: the Chatbot Assessment Reporting Tool (CHART) statement

  British journal of surgery · 2025-08-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  The Chatbot Assessment Reporting Tool (CHART) is a reporting guideline developed to provide reporting recommendations for studies evaluating the performance of generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots when summarizing clinical evidence and providing health advice, referred to as chatbot health advice studies. CHART was developed in several phases after performing a comprehensive systematic review to identify variation in the conduct, reporting, and method in chatbot health advice studies. Findings from the review were used to develop a draft checklist that was revised through an international, multidisciplinary, modified, asynchronous Delphi consensus process of 531 stakeholders, three synchronous panel consensus meetings of 48 stakeholders, and subsequent pilot testing of the checklist. CHART includes 12 items and 39 subitems to promote transparent and comprehensive reporting of chatbot health advice studies. These include title (subitem 1a), abstract/summary (subitem 1b), background (subitems 2a,b), model identifiers (subitems 3a,b), model details (subitems 4a-c), prompt engineering (subitems 5a,b), query strategy (subitems 6a-d), performance evaluation (subitems 7a,b), sample size (subitem 8), data analysis subitem 9a), results (subitems 10a-c), discussion (subitems 11a-c), disclosures (subitem 12a), funding (subitem 12b), ethics (subitem 12c), protocol (subitem 12d), and data availability (subitem 12e). The CHART checklist and corresponding diagram of the method were designed to support key stakeholders including clinicians, researchers, editors, peer reviewers, and readers in reporting, understanding, and interpreting the findings of chatbot health advice studies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Response by Zhao et al to Letters Regarding Article, “Intracranial Atherosclerotic Disease and Incident Dementia: The ARIC Study (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities)”

  Circulation · 2025-03-24

  letter
  PublisherDOI

• Reporting guideline for Chatbot Health Advice studies: the CHART statement

  UNC Libraries · 2025-08-07

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Standardization and Prediction to Control Confounding: Estimating Risk Differences and Ratios for Clinical Interpretations and Decision Making

  Annals of Internal Medicine · 2025-04-07 · 4 citations

  review

  What is the added risk for death from smoking? Logistic regression has become the most common statistical method to answer such questions in the biomedical literature. However, the typical analyses estimate odds ratios, a metric too often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Although estimates of risks, and their differences and ratios, offer transparent clinical interpretations, commonly used statistical models have known methodological shortcomings. "Standardization" through modeling, weighting, or matching offers a solution. The goals of this article are to review classical concepts of standardization and to link them to regression modeling for causal inference. The authors also describe approaches based on weighting and matching compared with regression-based standardization. Using an example of smoking from the ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) study, they explain the value of standardization, long used in medicine and public health, to estimate risks and their differences and ratios for binary outcomes. The authors demonstrate how standard statistical software using models that best fit the data and respect underlying biological or clinical processes can reexpress results in clinically meaningful metrics. The Supplement offers examples with common software packages.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantitative susceptibility mapping, chi-separation (χ-separation), and their associations with cognitive functions in the UK Biobank study

  Proceedings on CD-ROM - International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Scientific Meeting and Exhibition/Proceedings of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Scientific Meeting and Exhibition · 2025-09-16

  article

  Motivation: QSM and health outcomes were previously evaluated for QSM in subcortical regions. Furthermore, QSM is limited by its inability to distinguish iron and myelin. Goal(s): We expanded the construction of QSM to both cortical and subcortical regions and to apply a novel method (χ-separation) the separate iron and myelin content. We evaluated the associations of QSM and χ-separation with age and with cognitive function. Approach: We used multivariable linear regression models to evaluate the associations in the UK Biobank. Results: Higher QSM values in cortical regions were associated with poor memory and executive function. Higher χ-separation values were associated with poor prospective memory. Impact: Higher iron content in the brain may be associated with poor cognitive function. These associations need to be further investigated in longitudinal data sets to evaluate the progression of cognitive decline and neurodegenerative disease development.

  PublisherDOI

• Framework to prioritize health outcomes of particulate matter exposure using national claims data

  PLoS ONE · 2025-12-12

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  OBJECTIVES: Although particulate matter (PM) exposure poses significant public health risks, previous research has focused on limited clinical areas. However, emerging evidence and pathological mechanisms of PM suggest that PM may exert broader systemic effects across a wide range of diseases. Therefore, we aim to identify and prioritize research questions to evaluate health impacts of PM exposure across various clinical specialties. METHODS: A structured collaborative process was conducted between April and November 2024 in South Korea, incorporating systematic literature reviews, multidisciplinary expert discussions, and knowledge-sharing seminars. The primary outcomes were the identification of diseases potentially influenced by PM exposure and the development of corresponding research questions. The literature review synthesized more than 417 publications, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's integrated science assessment materials, a government-issued abstract compendium on PM covering 2010-2019, and studies published from 2020 to 2024 identified via a structured search. These were categorized by exposure duration (short- or long-term) and diseases outcome (incidence or progression). Prioritization was based on three criteria: pathological causality, clinical impact (public health burden), and feasibility using the Korea National Health Insurance Service (K-NHIS). RESULTS: A total of 99 experts from epidemiology, data science, and 14 clinical specialties participated. The experts panel (mean age: 46.1 years; mean professional experience: 20.5 years) identified 211 research questions across 80 diseases. These were classified by disease outcome: disease incidence (short-term, 54; long-term, 64) and progression (short-term, 47; long-term, 46). Notably, several clinical areas such as ophthalmology, dermatology, and otolaryngology were underrepresented. CONCLUSION: This structured, multidisciplinary approach broadened the scope of PM-related clinical research beyond commonly studied clinical area. This scalable framework can be adapted in other regions with similar claims data systems to guide evidence-based research agendas and inform public health policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Damage Control in the Wake of Political Action That Threatens the Integrity of Medical Research

  Annals of Internal Medicine · 2025-03-03 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01HL070299

  NIH · $1.5M · 2007

• CAMARO-ESRD: Cardiac Arrhythmia Monitoring and Related Outcomes in End Stage Renal Disease Patients

  NIH · $2.3M · 2016–2022

• NIH Grant R01ES015597

  NIH · $1.5M · 2013

• NIH Grant R01ES012673

  NIH · $1.4M · 2009

Frequent coauthors

• Juhee Cho

  Samsung (South Korea)

  1042 shared

• Ana Navas‐Acién

  Columbia University

  498 shared

• Danbee Kang

  Samsung Medical Center

  445 shared

• Yoosoo Chang

  Kangbuk Samsung Hospital

  362 shared

• Jason G. Umans

  Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science

  348 shared

• Di Zhao

  Johns Hopkins University

  344 shared

• Kevin A. Francesconi

  325 shared

• Walter Goessler

  University of Graz

  313 shared

Awards & honors

• Six Honor Calls in the MD Program, University of Zaragoza Sc…
• Fellow of Spain’s Program of Training of Graduate Research o…
• Fulbright Scholar, sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Health a…
• Faculty Innovation Award, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg…
• Scientist Development Award, American Heart Association (200…