AHNAK and hepatocellular carcinoma: The validation set included 80 people, ten healthy controls and ten individuals from each of the hepatitis B and C (total control n = 30) and 50 HCC (HCC stage1 n = 8; stage 2 n = 12, stage 3 n = 11 and stage 4 n = 19) (Table 2 and Additional file 14: Table S13) and examined the same genes as well as one additional hypomethylated gene: Neuroblast differentiation-associated protein (AHNAK) (cg14171514) (6b).