IL6 and cardiac hypertrophy: Experimentally, infusion of IL-6 in rats was able to induce cardiac hypertrophy, inflammation, fibrosis and diastolic dysfunction (Meléndez et al., 2010), whereas IL-6 genetic deletion ameliorated angiotensin II- (Coles et al., 2007; Ma et al., 2012) and norepinephrine-induced cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis (Meier et al., 2009).