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As humans, we are exposed daily to millions of potential pathogens, through contact, inhalation, or ingestion. Our ability to avoid infection depends on our immune system, which consits of two distinct, yet interrelated and interacting subsystems: the innate and adaptive immune system...

The metabolic syndrome (MetS) includes a set of abnormalities in metabolic risk markers that increases the risk for developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). For many years, several definitions for the MetS made by different societies, existed side-by-side...

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is a comprehensive term for arterial diseases of the extremities. For the legs, PAD can clinically result in intermittent claudication (IC) and critical limb ischemia (CLI). In IC, the patient experiences lower extremity muscle pain induced by activity, e.g. by walking. When the patient discontinues the activity, the muscle pain is relieved. In CLI, the patient has a more severe form of PAD, which presents as lower limb pain at rest, or as the inability of ulcers or gangrene to heal spontaneously...

The prostate is a walnut-sized glandular organ, located beneath the urinary bladder in men. The prostate contributes to urinary flow control and produces several enzymes that play a role in the function of seminal fluid. Testosterone and its more active metabolite dihydrotestosterone serve as nourishment for prostate tissue and regulate mitosis of prostate cells. Malignant neoplasms of the prostate, further referred to as prostate cancer (ICD-10 C61), usually originate in the glandular tissue...

Businesses are getting increasingly complex due to many facets: new technologies are changing the way people interact with each other and with businesses; the business environment and customer requirements are changing and consequently the goals and the objectives organisations strive to achieve. There is a need for understanding the businesses in order to manage them, to cope with these changes, and to be able to improve them to be more efficient and effective...

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a life-threatening genetic disorder that affects mostly the lungs but also the pancreas, liver and intestine. CF is characterised by chronic pulmonary inflammation resulting in a gradual, progressive decline in pulmonary function. The vast majority of CF patients also have an exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, resulting in inadequate digestion and leading to fat malabsorption and malnutrition...

It is increasingly recognized that communication as well as cooperative and coordinated behaviour of bacteria is important in the pathogenesis of infections. Cell communication between bacteria occurs in a population-density dependent manner and is based on the production of extracellular signal molecules by microbial cells that are detected by other cells and regulate gene expression...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in The Netherlands. Of the over 13.000 new CRC cases in 2011, approximately one third were diagnosed with rectal cancer. Historically, rectal cancer was associated with poor prognosis and with high local recurrence rates after surgery...

This thesis describes new insights in dendritic cell biology and contains disquisitions on antigen processing and presentation as well as the manipulation of these mechanisms using receptor mediated uptake. The work is aimed at better understanding dendritic cell (DC) biology, thereby contributing to pre-clinical work on DC vaccinations, which are being developed by the Utrecht Dendritic cells Against CancEr (U-DANCE) group...

The history of premature ejaculation (PE) is a history of contrasting hypotheses and sometimes vehement debates among medical specialists and psychologists, but it is also the history of pioneering clinicians and neuroscientists, who all together and throughout the years contributed to a better insight in a syndrome that for a very long time has been neglected in medical sexology and general medicine (Waldinger 2013)...

In the past decades, molecular methods for the detection of respiratory infections have expanded enormously, and novel molecular and serological methods continue to be developed. One of the greatest consequences of these new detection methods is the increase in the detection of viruses and bacteria in patients with respiratory infections...

Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia/Cardiomyopathy (ARVD/C) is a hereditary cardiomyopathy characterized by an increased risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) and ventricular arrhythmias with primarily right ventricular (RV) involvement. However, predominant left ventricular (LV) forms are increasingly recognized. Moreover, on the molecular level, both ventricles are affected in a similar manner...

There is one statement you cannot avoid in cancer research: “Cancer is a disease of the genome”. More than a century ago, even before the discovery of DNA, researchers observed that cancer cells show aberrant chromosomes and cell division1. It was discovered later that these aberrant chromosomes and other, smaller damages to the DNA are actually causing the cells to become cancerous, not just being the result thereof...

A syndrome is a collection of symptoms which occur together and may point to a single underlying cause for these symptoms. In case of nephrotic syndrome the symptoms are massive protein loss via the urine (i.e. proteinuria of more than 3.5 grams per 24 hours), low serum protein level, in particular low serum albumin, and as a consequence severe edema and high serum lipid levels...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are responsible for 30% of all deaths world wide. In the Netherlands, CVD were the second major cause of mortality, accounting for 28% of deaths in 2012. One of the risk factors for CVD is hypertension. Over 25% of adults world-wide was estimated to have hypertension in the year 2000...