Inflammatory cytokines have also been linked to the development of cardiac hypertrophy and fructose exposure in vitro increases the production of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6 and transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1 in cardiomyocytes (Zhang et al., 2016a; Kang et al., 2016; Lian et al., 2017; Xie, 2017; Zhao et al., 2017; Fan et al., 2018). Here, TNF is linked to cardiac hypertrophy.