Protective effects of fenofibrate against acute lung injury induced by intestinal ischemia/reperfusion in mice

Zhu, Qiankun; He, Guizhen; Wang, Jie; Wang, Yukang; Chen, Wei

There are some limitations of this study. In the first place, because of the amount of histological tissue and serum in mice, we did not access more inflammatory cytokines and oxidative proteins that may have potential functions in it. High throughput ELISA techniques that can measure more proteins with less tissue may be the best solution for this problem in the future. Secondly, although the 24-hour survival analysis demonstrated that pretreatment with fenofibrate improved survival rate significantly, we did not perform any life-sustaining operations during the 24 hours, which are routinely conducted in clinical resuscitations. In clinics, intensive care managements have to be performed in the life-threatening states. Therefore, whether the fenofibrate treatment could attenuate mortality caused by intestinal I/R in clinics is questionable and needs more transitional research to support. But we confidently believe that fenofibrate serve as a bridge between severe intestinal I/R and surgery. In the third place, as only caspase-3 was utilized to assess the apoptosis in the lung tissue, whether fenofibrate has an anti-apoptotic effect during ALI needs to be further investigated. However, it has been reported that TNF-α can trigger the apoptotic cascade by the death receptor/caspase pathway 32, 33 . Since we observed that fenofibrate decreased TNF-α production, it is sound to infer that fenofibrate alleviates apoptosis in ALI, at least in part, through an indirect manner.