Furthermore, the clinical significance of FSTL5 expression in patients with HCC was also investigated and suggested that FSTL5 was positively correlated with favourable prognosis in patients with liver cancer, which is consistent with prior study by Zhang et al20 Of note, our results firstly demonstrated that FSTL5 expression indicated favourable prognosis of patients with HCC at TNM stage I/II, while it had no significant correlation with the prognosis of patients with HCC at TNM stage III/IV. This evidence concerns the gene FSTL5 and liver cancer.