Taken together, the clinicopathological features in sporadic BRCA1-methylated breast cancers compared with BRCA1-unmethylated tumors in our meta-analysis showed that sporadic breast carcinomas with BRCA1 promoter methylation had molecular and clinicopathologic phenotype similar to those of hereditary BRCA1-mutated breast cancers, which was in line with several reports27, 37. The gene discussed is BRCA1; the disease is breast cancer.