MMP9 and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: In this study, we found that overexpression of MMP-9, TN-C and fTN-C was correlated with lymph node metastasis, vascular invasion, hepatic metastasis and TNM stage, but not differentiation, this is little inconsistent with previous study by Juuti et al. [31], which shows that TN-C is correlated with differentiation.