Table 3 Effect of carbon tetrachloride (CCl₄) and pioglitazone (PGZ) treatment on ALT, necroinflammation, hepatic expression of proinflammatory mediators, and hepatic iNOS protein.

	Control	CCl4 5 wk	CCl4 2 wk + CCl4/PGZ 3 wk
ALT (IU/l)	48 (12)	345 (189)†	332 (168)†*
Ishak's score necrosis	0.1 (0.1)	4.8 (2.7)†	4.4 (1.9)†*
Ishak's score+inflammation	0.3 (0.2)	8.5 (4.4)†	7.3 (3.2)†*
IL‐6 mRNA‡	1 (0.2)	5.2 (1.8)†	7.0 (2.5)†*
IL‐1β mRNA‡	1 (0.2)	9.2 (4.2)†	14.3 (3.7)†*
MCP‐1 mRNA‡	1 (0.4)	2.1 (0.5)†	3.2 (2.2)†*
CINC (IL‐8) mRNA‡	1 (0.6)	13.5 (2.2)†	10.8 (3.1)†*
iNOS protein§	35 (11)	108 (32)†	153 (41)†*

ALT, alanine aminotransferase; IL, interleukin; MCP‐1, monocyte chemoattractant protein; iNOS, inducible nitric oxide synthase.

‡Hepatic mRNA levels measured by real time polymerase chain reaction using RPL‐19 mRNA as an invariant control and expressed relative to values in the control group arbitrarily set at 1 (see materials and methods).

§Hepatic protein measured by western blotting and expressed as a ratio of the optical density of the iNOS band to that of β‐actin, used as a loading control (see materials and methods).

*No significant difference in PGZ treated versus CCl₄ only rats.

†p<0.05 or higher degree of significance versus controls.