Biological memory in ischemic preconditioning

Ischemic preconditioning is a phenomenon in which a period of sublethal ischemia protects the myocardium from infarction during a subsequent prolonged ischemic insult. Experimental results show that a brief ischemic preconditioning can generate a long response lasting several days, but the underlying mechanisms of the biological memory remain poorly understood. In this study, we used a mathematical model to study dynamical mechanisms of biological memory. Our findings suggest that: the positive feedback is the main cause of memory effect in cardioprotection, and that the stronger a positive feedback loop is, the longer memory duration (the extreme case is the irreversibility) the system may have.