First, though risk factors such as gender, age, blood routine indexes (clinical factors), karyotype, risk stratification (cytogenetics factor) and somatic mutations (including FLT3-ITD, NPM1 and DNMT3A) were adjusted during data analysis, other important risk factors, such as CEBPA, KIT and IDH1/2 mutations, which may also contribute to the prognosis of AML [22, 69–72], were ignored in this study. The gene discussed is NPM1; the disease is acute myeloid leukemia.