Fig. 5

Expression of HIV-1 p24 viral protein does not coincide with rapid progression of HAD. (A) p24 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 control (P) was used for iNOS protein. ND and NP samples were from separate immunoblots (white space between blots) and aligned for comparison. (B) Mean levels of p24 protein were 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 p24 were analyzed for significance by the Kruskal-Wallis test for multiple groups (p ≤ 0.22). Fisher’s least-significance difference posthoc test did not indicate significant differences for p24 (RP to ND, p ≤ 0.13.11; RP to NP, p ≤ 0.3231; RP to MP, p ≤ 0.0513). Data are means ± SEM. (C) The Spearman rank correlation test was used to compare p24/β-tubulin ratios to progression of HAD and yielded ρ = 0.171, p ≤ 0.467. (D) The Spearman rank correlation test was used to compare p24/β-tubulin ratios to severity of HAD and yielded ρ = 0.284, p ≤ 0.114. Eleven additional cases were used in the statistical analysis (24).