Shi et al. (2015) identified that ESCC patients with high levels of PCAT1 had poorer survival times than those with low levels of PCAT1. Moreover, recent studies have suggested that a PCAT1 genetic variant may play an essential role in the susceptibility to several cancers (Ren et al., 2017; Zhao, Hou & Zhan, 2015). Yuan et al. (2018) found that rs1902432 in PCAT1 was significantly associated with an increased risk of PCa, and Lin et al. (2017) found that rs710886 of PCAT1 was significantly associated with bladder cancer risk in a Chinese population. Here, PCAT1 is linked to posterior cortical atrophy.