We found that the ESCC patients with the high expression of SPRY4-IT1 showed a higher rate of cervical and superior mediastinal lymph-node metastasis in comparison to the low expression of SPRY4-IT1 group (P = 0.039, Table 2).However, no significant association was observed between the cervical and superior mediastinal lymph-node recurrence and the SPRY4-IT1 expression level(P = 0.509,Table 3). The gene discussed is SPRY4; the disease is esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.