Hypoxic Preconditioning Preserves Cardiac Contractility and Reduces Infarct Size In Vivo

Background: Preconditioning is a powerful endogenous mechanism to protect the heart against ischemic damage. The second window of preconditioning (SWOP) is therapeutically the most attractive, but is hard to achieve by local cardiac ischemia 24 hrs before the index ischemia in the many mice models for cardiovascular pathology, because of excessive mortality during the two procedures or the period in between. Hypoxic preconditioning is an attractive alternative preconditioning stimulus. To date, the SWOP after hypoxic preconditioning has not been studied in mice concerning infarct size reduction and preservation of left ventricular contractility in vivo.