POSTN and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: Patients were categorized into high and low POSTN expression groups, which revealed significant associations with tumor differentiation (P = 0.006), TNM stage (P < 0.001), tumor size (P = 0.006), lymph node metastasis (P < 0.001), vascular invasion (P = 0.003), and distant metastasis (P = 0.002) (Table 1).