The dual effects of autophagy in myocardial hypertrophy

Autophagy played a crucial role for survival when cells were suff ering from nutrient deprivation, as autophagy could engulf and degenerate macromolecules to provide new nutrients and energy. Autophagy also plays an essential role in maintaining cellular homeostasis, which was activated in response to the cellular stresses in hypertensive heart disease. Interestingly, many studies had proven that the baseline and up-regulation of autophagy played a benefi cial role in myocardial hypertrophy while other studies found that up-regulated autophagy was associated with myopathies. In this review, we showed the signalling pathways which were involved in myocardial hypertrophy. Besides, we talked about the protective as well as harmful eff ects of autophagy in myocardial hypertrophy. Finally, we proposed the possible reasons of dual eff ects of autophagy in hypertrophy, including the degree of the activation, the stage of the disease and the signalling pathways responsible for the activation of autophagy, etc.