VEGFA and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: Huang et al. [32] included nine articles met the inclusion criteria for our meta-analysis to examine the relationship between the protein expression of VEGF and lymph node metastasis (LNM) in papillary thyroid cancer, and reported that LNM occurred more frequently in papillary thyroid cancer patients with high VEGF expression than in those with low VEGF expression.