MTOR and cardiac hypertrophy: On the molecular biology level, pathological cardiac hypertrophy has been demonstrated to be related to abnormal expression of some cardiac hypertrophy-related genes and activation of signalling pathways including calcineurin, mTOR signalling, serine/threonine kinase calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase type II (CaMKII), phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K), alpha serine/threonine-protein kinase (Akt) and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) [1–4].