CTHRC1 and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: Furthermore, statistical analysis exhibited that high CTHRC1 expression was strongly correlated with the differentiation degree (p<0.001), clinical stage (p<0.001), T classification (p<0.001), lymph node metastasis (p=0.013) and distant metastasis (p<0.001) of patients with NSCLC, and this was further verified by the Spearman correlation analysis (Table 2).