CEACAM5 and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: We investigated the impact of SNCG level on the clinical outcome of patients with normal preoperative serum CEA levels and our results demonstrated that SNCG remained an independent prognostic variable for these patients and affected patients' survival, but the clinicopathologic factors such as TNM stage, lymph node metastasis, depth of invasion, all didn't influence the patients' survival.