Moreover, in these 79 pairs of HCC and adjacent normal tissue samples, SGLT1 and FLIPL expression were correlated with tumor stage (Tables 1 and 2) in liver cancer tissues, but the correlation between the expression and sex or age was not statistically significant in both liver cancer tissues and their adjacent normal specimens (Tables 1 and 2, Additional file 1: Table S1 and Table S2). Here, SLC5A1 is linked to liver cancer.