Biographical Sketch

Frans Rutten studied medicine at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and graduated in 1986. As part of his internship, he worked in the Sumve Hospital in Tanzania in 1985 and studied vaccination rates of children. From August 1986 till December 1988 he worked as a physician in the department of internal medicine and cardiology of the St. Jozef Hospital, Kerkrade, the Netherlands. From December 1987 till December 1988 he worked as a physician in the department of cardiology in the Academic Hospital Maastricht. In Januari 1989 he started his 2-year vocational training in general practice at the Utrecht University. In November 1991 he settled as a general practitioner in Rhenen, a small city in the center of the Netherlands. From 1991 onwards he participated in Dutch general practice guidelines, focussed on cardiovascular disease and the multidisciplinairy guideline on heart failure. Till 1999 he worked full-time in general practice. In July 1999 he started to work part-time at the Julius Center and obtained his PhD degree in 2005 on 'Heart failure in COPD'. Since 2005 he works as a associate professor and since April 2014 as assistant professor at the Julius Center.

Interests and Focus

His main interest is cardiac diseases, especially heart failure. The domain is mainly primary care, and the focus diagnostic and prognostic research. Furthermore, he is  interested in the mechanisms involved in the disease development and progression of both heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He participates in the Utrecht Heart Failure Organisation (UHFO), a co-operation between general practitioners and epidemiologists of the Julius Center and the departments of cardiology, pulmonary diseases, pathology, and radiology of the University Medical Center Utrecht. He also participates in Queen of Hearts, an international consortium focussing on risk factors in women for developing heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. In 2006 he was rewarded with the Heert Dokter price for the best research paper in 'Huisarts en Wetenschap', a Dutch general practitioners' journal. He reviews multiple (inter)national journals and was faculty in (inter)national post-graduate teaching courses, including the first European course on heart failure for general practitioners in 2007 in co-operation with the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology. He was member the Scientific Advisory Board of the Netherlands Heart Foundation and the Editorial Board of 'Hartbulletin', a journal of the Netherlands Heart Foundation. He has authored over 80 papers in peer-reviewed journals and co-authored 7 national books on cardiovascular disease. At the moment he supervises 10 PhD students.

Key Publications

• Differences between general practitioners and cardiologists in diagnosis and management of heart failure: a survey in every-day practice

  Rutten FH, Grobbee DE, Hoes AW Eur J Heart Fail, 2003;5:337-344

• Unrecognized heart failure in elderly patients with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

  Rutten FH, Cramer MJ, Grobbee DE, Sachs AP, Kirkels JH, Lammers JW, Hoes AW Eur Heart J, 2005;26:1887-94

• Recognising heart failure in elderly patients with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in primary care: cross sectional diagnostic study

  Rutten FH, Moons KC, Cramer MJ, Grobbee DE, Zuithoff NP, Lammers JW, Hoes AW Br Med J, 2005;331:1379-85.

• Heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: An ignored combination?

  Rutten FH, Cramer MJ, Lammers JW, Grobbee DE, Hoes AW Eur J Heart Fail, 2006;8:706-11

• Comparison of B-type natriuretic peptide assays for identifying heart failure in stable elderly patients with a clinical diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

  Rutten FH, Cramer MJ, Zuithoff NP, Lammers JW, Verweij W, Grobbee DE, Hoes AW Eur J Heart Fail, 2007;9:651-59

• Beta-blockers may reduce mortality and risk of exacerbations in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

  Rutten FH, Zuithoff NP, Hak E, Grobbee DE, Hoes AW Arch Intern Med, 2010;170:880-7

• High prevalence of previously unknown heart failure and left ventricular dysfunction in patients with type 2 diabetes

  Boonman-Winter LJ, Rutten FH, Cramer MJ, Landman MA, Rutten GE, Hoes AW Diabetologia, 2012;55:2154-62

• Resting heart rate is a risk factor for mortality in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease but not for exacerbations or pneumonia

  Warnier MJ, Rutten FH, de Boer A, Hoes AW, de Bruin ML PlosOne, 2014;9:e105152

• Prevalence of unrecognized heart failure in older persons with shortness of breath on exertion

  van Riet EE, Hoes AW, Limburg A, Landman MA, van der Hoeven H, Rutten FH Eur J Heart Fail, 2014;16:772-7

• Unrecognized heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in frail elderly detected through a near-home targeted screening strategy

  van Mourik Y, Bertens LC, Cramer MJ, Lammers JW, Reitsma JB, Moons KB, Hoes AW, Rutten FH J Am Board Fam Med, 2014;27:811-21