TNF and cardiac hypertrophy: The nucleoside counteracts the activity of many neurohumoral factors involved in cardiac hypertrophy, namely endothelin-1 (Stowe et al., 1997), renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (Taddei et al., 1992) and TNF-α (Wagner et al., 1998), and noradrenaline release from sympathetic nerves (Burgdorf et al., 2001).