In conclusion, there is substantial evidence indicating that autophagy is a significant regulator of innate immunity responses in host defence. The decline in autophagy with aging impairs cellular housekeeping and exposes cells to the risk of inflammasome activation. There is now convincing experimental data demonstrating that efficient autophagic activity can prevent the activation of inflammasomes and induction of inflammatory responses. AMPK activators and mTOR inhibitors are promising pharmacological agents which can effectively stimulate autophagic degradation. However, many of the present agents have toxic side effects and they can trigger apoptotic cell death. Moreover, it is still a matter of debate whether excessive autophagy can lead to autophagic cell death or not [126]. It seems that generally autophagy is a cell survival mechanism but it can be used for cell death e.g. during development [127] and in some contexts such as in tumor cell death after chemotherapeutic drug treatment [128].
