Postconditioning as a method tissue survivability enhancement in ischemic damage

Abstract

The article presents the present-day data on the phenomenon of ischemic myocardial postconditioning. It has been shown, that this phenomenon consists in protection of the heart from reperfusion damage by the means of short episodes of ischemia/reperfusion performed at the early stage after prolonged ischemia. It is presented that postconditioning effect manifests in limiting the size of infarction and preserving endothelial function in the region exposed to ischemic injury. The article reports on the modern concept of role of various intracellular signal cascades in providing survival of the cell after the episode of ischemia/reperfusion. Much attention is given to changing in the state of pores localized in internal mitochondrial membrane as end links of realization of postconditioning effect. Prospects of clinical use of postconditioning are very optimistic due to the fact that application of different variants of preconditioning is limited because in most cases it is impossible to predict the time of occurrence of ischemic injury, whereas postconditioning may be used after prolonged ischemia.

Keywords

• postconditioning
• ischemia
• myocardial infarction
• signal cascade