The overexpression of AKR1B1 has been reported in breast, ovarian, cervical, lung, hepatocellular, and rectal cancer [27,37,38,39,40], but down-regulation of AKR1B1 has been observed in adenocarcinoma samples compared to adjacent nontumor tissue in endometrial and colorectal cancer [22,24,25,26]. Here, AKR1B1 is linked to rectal cancer.