Our study also found that mucinous-type early-stage adenocarcinoma was more common in ALK-positive patients (13.8% vs. 5.4%, P = 0.014), which is consistent with the report by Yoshida et al [28] They demonstrated that the mucinous cribriform pattern was present in 56% of ALK-positive tumors and in only 1% of ALK-negative tumors (P < 0.0001), which was confirmed to be the strongest histologic indicator of ALK rearrangement by multivariate analysis. This evidence concerns the gene ALK and adenocarcinoma.