Supplemental Table 1 demonstrates that negative symptoms, negative lymph node metastasis and a negative resection margin were closely correlated with high VDR expression. Regarding OS, after multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis, only low VDR staining intensity was identified as independent predictors for an inferior OS rate (Supplemental Table 2 and Fig. 8), in line with the previous study27. This evidence concerns the gene VDR and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes.