Preconditioning with ischemia: a delay of lethal cell injury in ischemic myocardium
C.E.Murry, R.B. Jennings, K.A. Reimer

This was the first preconditioning paper. For quite a while, investigators had been noticing that repeated short coronary occlusions did not produce as much myocardial damage or as many arrhythmias or the same amount of ATP depletion as one long sustained occlusion...

Protection against infarction afforded by preconditioning is mediated by A1 adenosine receptors in rabbit heart
G.S. Liu, J. Thornton, D.M. Van Winkle, A.W.H. Stanley, R.A. Olsson, J.M. Downey

Although preconditioning had been identified 5 years prior to this study, its mechanism remained to be determined...

Preconditioning protects ischemic rabbit heart by protein kinase C activation
K. Ytrehus, Y. Liu, J.M. Downey

Substantial evidence supported the idea that adenosine receptor stimulation “switched on” preconditioning, but making the leap from adenosine receptor activation to tougher, more ischemia-resistant myocytes was a long one...

Blockade of ATP-sensitive potassium channels prevents myocardial preconditioning in dogs
G.J. Gross, J.A. Auchampach

Even though the “adenosine hypothesis” looked like a good explanation for preconditioning,..

Adaptation to ischemia during percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty: clinical, hemodynamic, and metabolic features
E. Deutsch, M. Berger, W.G. Kussmaul, J.W. Hirshfeld Jr, H.C. Herrmann, W.K. Laskey

Does preconditioning occur in humans? That was the question posed in this paper published in 1990...

Preconditioning of ischemic myocardium: reperfusion-induced arrhythmias
K. Shiki, D.J. Hearse

When this paper was published, preconditioning was still a fairly young concept, generally associated with infarct size reduction in dogs...

Myocardial infarct size-limiting effect of ischemic preconditioning: its natural decay and the effect of repetitive preconditioning
T. Miura, T. Adachi, T. Ogawa, T. Iwamoto, A. Tsuchida, O. Iimura

Although impressive resistance to infarction, arrhythmias, and functional deficits had been documented in a number of preconditioning studies, it was important to determine if these effects lasted long enough to be useful clinically...

Preconditioning cultured human pediatric myocytes requires adenosine and protein kinase C
J.S. Ikonomidis, T. Shirai, R.D. Weisel, B. Derylo, V. Rao, C.I. Whiteside, D.A.G. Mickle, R.K. Li

This group had shown earlier that it was possible to culture human pediatric myocytes and simulate “ischemia” by subjecting the cells to a low-volume, anoxic environment for 20 minutes...

Previous angina alters in-hospital outcome in TIMI 4: a clinical correlate of preconditioning?
R.A. Kloner, T. Shook, K. Przyklenk, V.G. Davis, L. Junio, R.V. Matthews, S. Burstein, C.M. Gibson, W.K. Poole, C.P. Cannon, C.H. McCabe, E. Braunwald, and the TIMI 4 investigators

In their landmark 1986 paper, (see page 216), Murry et al postulated that myocardial ischemia, which produced angina in human patients, might also be preconditioning hearts to reduce or delay myocardial injury due to a subsequent sustained occlusion...

Cardiac stress protein elevation 24 hours after brief ischemia or heat stress is associated with resistance to myocardial infarction
M.S. Marber, D.S. Latchman, J.M. Walker, D.M. Yellon

Until this study by Marber et al, most work on preconditioning had concentrated on myocardial protection in the first couple of hours after inducing preconditioning, and it was clear that the protection did not last very long...