Furthermore, the current meta-analysis included 1303 patients, and our results suggested that strong relations emerged between the high expression of AEG-1 and clinical stage (OR=3.23, 95%CI: 2.41–4.33, P < 0.001), lymph node metastasis (OR=2.24, 95%CI: 1.76–2.84, P < 0.001), distant metastasis (OR=3.39, 95%CI: 1.85–6.23, P < 0.001), and histological differentiation (OR=1.77, 95%CI: 1.17–2.69, P = 0.007), but does not support associations between age (OR=1.01, 95%CI: 0.80–1.28, P = 0.937) or gender (OR=1.28, 95%CI: 1.00–1.63, P = 0.054) and a high expression of AEG-1 (Figure 3). The gene discussed is MTDH; the disease is metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes.