What is the difference between apoptosis and autophagy? They are both programmed and they both lead to cell death when switched on by some stimuli. To me it appears a useless classification.
Autophagy allows the orderly degradation and recycling of cellular components, e.g. damaged organelles, cell membranes and proteins.
Apoptosis is the programmed death of the complete cell.
Autophagy therefore is a thought to be a recycling mechanism or used to overcome starvation. The failure of autophagy is even thought to be one of the main reasons for the accumulation of damaged cells and aging.
It is unclear, whether autophagic activity in dying cells is the cause of death or is actually an attempt to prevent it. So far there is no definite prove of a causative relationship between the autophagic process and cell death. Autophagic activity in dying cells might actually be a survival mechanism.
As compared with apoptosis requiring caspase activation, autophagy is an eating-me signal pathway triggered by hypo-nutrient or hypoxic microenvironment. Auophagic cell death is triggered by persistent JNK signal activation.
It is highly likely that DHA induces autophagic cancer cell death, defined as cell death due to excessive autophagy. Surprisingly enough, autophagic cell death in mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) established from Bax/Bak double-knockout mice, which are resistant to apoptotic cell death, was rescued by 3-MA treatment.
[Reference]
Therapeutic strategies of drug repositioning targeting autophagy to induce cancer cell death: from pathophysiology to treatment
J Hematol Oncol. 2017 Mar 9;10(1):67. doi: 10.1186/s13045-017-0436-9.
https://jhoonline.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13045-017-0436-9
To the concept that have already been express we should add that apoptosis is an irreversible process once caspases are activated while autophagy is reversible. If external or internal condition change, autophagy permits the cell to a restitutio ad integrum.
We do not know when autophagy becomes an irreversible death path.
According to certain publications it is ptobably that autophagia becomes irreversible when ATP in the cells decrease below 1/3 of its normal pool.
Try these links
Article Edinger AL, Thompson CB.. Death by design: apoptosis, necros...
Article Apoptosis and autophagy: Regulatory connections between two ...
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