Fig. 2

Expression of iNOS protein coincides with rapid progression of HAD. (A) iNOS and β-tubulin (βTub) protein immunoblots of postmortem cortical tissue from HIV-1-infected patients with no dementia (ND), non-progression (NP), moderate progression (MP), and rapid progression (RP) of HAD. These results were replicated three times with similar results. Positive controls (P) were obtained from lipopolysaccharide-stimulated rodent glial cultures. ND and NP samples were from separate immunoblots (white space between blots) and aligned for comparison. (B) Mean levels of iNOS protein relative to that of β-tubulin from HIV-1-infected patients with ND, NP, MP, and RP. Representative blots are shown in (A). The levels of iNOS were analyzed for significance by means of the Kruskal-Wallis test for multiple groups (p ≤ 0.05). *Fisher’s least-significance difference posthoc test indicated highly significant differences for iNOS (RP to ND, p ≤ 0.0001; RP to NP, p ≤ 0.0003; RP to MP, p ≤ 0.0229). Data are means ± SEM. (C) The Spearman rank correlation test was used to compare iNOS/β-tubulin ratios to progression of HAD and yielded ρ = 0.611, p ≤ 0.010. (D) The Spearman rank correlation test was used to compare iNOS/β-tubulin ratios to severity of HAD and yielded ρ = 0.618, p ≤ 0.001. Eleven additional cases were used in the statistical analysis (24).