Mitochondrias' sense of SNO: pathway to cardioprotection in ischaemic preconditioning

This Editorial refers to ‘Ischaemic preconditioning preferentially increases protein S-nitrosylation in subsarcolemmal mitochondria’ by J. Sun et al. , pp. 227–236. Ischaemic heart disease (IHD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. The optimal therapy in an acute myocardial infarction is the timely reperfusion of the ischaemic myocardium. This leads to a reduction in infarct size (IS) and improves the prognosis of the patients. The reperfusion of the ischaemic myocardium, however, can cause injury itself and first clinical investigations revealed that up to 50% of the final IS may be caused by reperfusion (for review, see1). As the prevalence of IHD increases and the IS being an important determinant of heart failure, a medical need exists to develop strategies to protect the heart from ischaemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury and thus to improve patients' outcome.2,3 During the last years, different endogenous cardioprotective strategies such as ischaemic preconditioning (IPC), ischaemic …