The majority of studies have reported that enhancing autophagy in the myocardium is cardioprotective. Here, we tested the hypothesis that ghrelin, a growth hormone-releasing peptide, will protect infarcted myocardium by inducing of autophagy. Myocardial infarction was induced in mice by left coronary artery ligation the surviving mice 24 h after surgical were started on 2 week treatments with one of the following: vehicle, acylated ghrelin(50 mg/kg per day) or acylated ghrelin plus 3-MA(an autophagy inhibitor, 15 mg/kg, per day). We found that ghrelin significantly improved the cardiac function, and autophagy was enhanced by elevated LC3-II/LC-I ratio and mRNA expression of autophagy related protein. In vitro, cultured neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes were subjected to simulate ischemia/ reperfusion, 3-MA significantly attenuated ghrelin-induced autophagy, which was associated with activated AMP -activated protein kinase (AMPK) signal pathway. Moreover, ghrelin reduced cell death, and RNAi-mediated knockdown of autophagy protein 5 (Atg5) partly abolished ghrelin's cardioprotective effect. It is the first time to demonstrate that the cardioprotective effect of ghrelin on ischemia myocardium in part through regulating of autophagy signal pathway. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.