Our finding agrees with a study of 146 Japanese patients, mainly with distal gastric cancer (Urano et al, 2006), and with some published reports showing HIF-1α has no prognostic significance in cervical (Haugland et al, 2002; Hutchison et al, 2004), colorectal (Yoshimura et al, 2004) and ovarian (Birner et al, 2001) cancers. The gene discussed is HIF1A; the disease is cancer.