We confirmed that the amount and integrity of total RNA was adequate for qRT–PCR analysis (RNA integrity number higher than 5), and used these samples for qRT–PCR quantification of transcripts for five genes well known as differentially expressed in PCa: AMACR (Luo et al, 2002; Rubin et al, 2002), HPN (Dhanasekaran et al, 2001; Luo et al, 2001; Magee et al, 2001) and EPCAM (Strnad et al, 1989; Poczatek et al, 1999), overexpressed in PCa, and LAMB3 (Hao et al, 1996) and KRT5 (Ordonez, 1998; Abrahams et al, 2002), underexpressed in PCa. The gene discussed is EPCAM; the disease is posterior cortical atrophy.