Consistent with our findings, previous studies showed that SMYD3 overexpression was an independent prognostic risk factor for poor prognosis in LIHC (Fei et al., 2017), that the expression of SMYD3 was significantly positively correlated with the expression of transcription 3 (STAT3), and that the prognosis of GC patients with high SMYD3 expression was poor (Liu Y. et al., 2015). Here, STAT3 is linked to gastric cancer.