When the survival status of the patients with different NEFL expression levels and different stages of progression was analyzed, NEFL mRNA expression level was found to be a prognostic factor to predict DFS of early-stage breast cancer patients, including patients with clinical stage I/II disease (P = 0.0004, Figure 1B), patients with negative lymph nodes (P = 0.008, Figure 1C), and patients with histological grade I/II tumors (P = 0.006, Figure 1D). Here, NEFL is linked to breast cancer.