BDNF and cardiac arrest: Contrary to the assumption that hypothermia generally suppresses new protein synthesis, there is evidence in the adult rat that mild hypothermia after cardiac arrest or ischemia is associated with augmentation of growth factors such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), glial-cell-line derived neurotrophic factor and extracellular-signal regulated kinase (D'Cruz et al., 2002; Schmidt et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2011), which might help protect injured cells.