Shen-fu injection preconditioning inhibits myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury in diabetic rats: Activation of eNOS via the PI3K/Akt pathway

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether Shen-fu injection (SFI), a traditional Chinese medicine, could attenuate myocardial ischemia-reperfusion (MI/R) injury in diabetes. Streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats were randomly assigned to the Sham, I/R, SFI preconditioning, and SFI plus wortmannin (a phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase inhibitor) groups. After the treatment, hearts were subjected to 30min of coronary artery occlusion and 2h reperfusion except the Sham group. Myocardial infarct size and cardiomyocytes apoptosis were increased significantly in MI/R group as compared with the Sham group. SFI preconditioning significantly decreased infarct size, apoptosis, caspase-3 protein expression, MDA level in myocardial tissues, and plasma level of CK and LDH but increased p-Akt, p-eNOS, bcl-2 protein expression, and SOD activity compared to I/R group. Moreover, SFI-induced cardioprotection was abolished by wortmannin. We conclude that SFI preconditioning protects diabetic hearts from I/R injury via PI3K/Akt-dependent pathway. Copyright © 2011 Yang Wu et al.