Hypermethylation of five autophagy-related genes, BECN-1, ATG16L2, ULK2, BNIP3 and a variant of LC3A, were previously reported respectively in BC, leukemia, astrocytoma, colorectal cancer and esophageal carcinoma and these data demonstrated that this hypermethylation was correlated to tumor grade [15–19]. Here, BECN1 is linked to astrocytoma (excluding glioblastoma).