Editorial commentary: Vagal nerve stimulation for myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury: Hope or Hype?

Early coronary revascularization, with concomitant medical management, is the mainstay of therapy to reduce infarct size and improve cardiovascular outcomes including survival in patients with acute ischemic events. Disruption in vagal/sympathetic balance during ischemia may contribute to further damage. [...]vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) in animal models and in humans may be cardioprotective [2–9]. The myriad of potential VNS programming poses a barrier to standardizing investigations, and the seemingly infinite number of computations makes discovering the optimal settings for clinical outcomes an overwhelming task.VNS for acute myocardial injury – the bottom line Pre-clinical animal models [2–7,9] show promising results for use of VNS in ameliorating IRI.