Additionally, using the clinical data of 93 eligible esophageal cancer patients with stage I–IIIA from the TCGA dataset (version 09-14-2017), we found that the optimal cutoff of the elafin mRNA level was 25 (maximum Youden’s index = 0.086 and the corresponding p-value for group difference was 0.03). This evidence concerns the gene PI3 and esophageal cancer.