Reduction of autophagy: Another potential mechanism of cardioprotective effect of mild hypothermia?

Abstract

We read with great interest the recent article “Hypothermia may attenuate ischemia/reperfusion-induced cardiomyocyte death by reducing autophagy” by Cheng et al. [1] in the International Journal of Cardiology. The authors demonstrated that application of mild hypothermia could reduce the cell autophagy in H9c2 cardiomyocytes subjected to ischemia/reperfusion (I/R). To the best of our knowledge, autophagy, as one of the forms of programmed cell death, was firstly reported by the authors to be a potential mechanism for the cardioprotection provided by mild hypothermia.