The possible reasons for the lack of consistency between our study and the results from the TCGA database may be that (a) the caspase-3 expression might be regulated by varied environmental and genotoxic exposures between Asian and Western oral cancer populations; (b) the prognostic role of caspase-3 regulated at the mRNA and protein levels may be varied in cancer [17, 25]. Here, CASP3 is linked to cancer.