IKBKE and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: As shown in Table 1, high expression of IKKε was found to be significantly associated with poor differentiation (P = 0.021), depth of invasion (P = 0.034), lymph node metastasis (P< 0.001), distant metastasis (P = 0.006), and tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage (P = 0.005).