VEGFA and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: Also, STAT3 and VEGF co-expression was found to be associated with lymph node metastasis [28]; however, in our study such clear connection was not detected, although in high STAT3 expression GC patients the occurrence of lymph node metastasis was slightly higher than in those with low expression (76.7 vs. 61.3%, respectively; Table 1).