Heat Shock Protein Expression During Cardiac Surgery

Excerpt

There has been a great deal of interest in a group of cellular proteins collectively called heat shock proteins (HSPs) to identify their role in the inflammatory and cell-mediated responses that occur during heart surgery [1]. Although most patients do fine after cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB), some develop an inflammatory response clinically resembling a sepsis-like state. At the cellular level, several stress-related proteins, clustered as HSPs, participate in the inflammatory cascade mostly by acting as chaperons. Their basic role is to maintain the structural integrity of proteins under stress states by keeping them in their folded state, but their overexpression can lead to an inflammatory response. …