Immunostaining examination of tumor sections obtained from 142 patients showed that positive SOX9 expression was found to be correlated strongly with the clinicopathological stages of the patients' cancer (P = 0.022), but no significant relationship was found between age (P = 0.382) or gender (P = 0.240), or pathology (P = 0.312) (Table 2). Here, SOX9 is linked to cancer.