While there were several candidate genes related to the regulation of the pathways for distant metastasis in HNSCC identified by our key node analysis, as shown in Table 3, the AP-1 family genes were one of handful genes with high scores in the analysis for both the current dataset for distant metastatic vs. non-metastatic and our previous dataset for regional metastatic vs. non-metastatic. This evidence concerns the gene FOSB and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.