Another distinct finding of this study was the identification of the prognostic value of ZDHHC5 in LUAD, in contrast to that reported by Tian et al. (2015). Tian et al. (2015) performed survival analysis in a NSCLC cohort of 194 patients according to ZDHHC5 expression by immunostaining, and reported that the differences in expression were not statistically significant. In this study, we performed survival analysis of ZDHHC5 in 17 independent LUAD cohorts comprising 2244 cases. Meta-analysis was used to avoid biases and misinterpretations. Furthermore, a solid understanding of the IHC contrasting mechanism also positively impacted on determining the outcomes of the staining protocol. In fact, only membrane staining of ZDHHC5, without nuclear staining, was scored in Tian et al. (2015)’s study. In addition, NSCLC is comprised of several histological subtypes, and the expression of ZDHHC5 differs across different subtypes. Thus, we focused on the prognostic value of ZDHHC5 within adenocarcinoma, which should also be prospectively addressed.
