Table 1.

Demographic information of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) and healthy controls (HCs).

Varible	Discovery Set					Validation Set
group	HC	early-stage CRC		late-stage CRC		HC	early-stage CRC		late-stage CRC
number of samples	n = 40	n = 40		n = 40		n = 80	n = 100		n = 106
		stage I	stage II	stage III	stage IV		stage I	stage II	stage III	stage IV
		n =20	n =20	n =20	n =20		n = 47	n =53	n =50	n =56
male: female ratio	24:16	24:16		24:16		46:34	71:29		66:40
mean age years ± SD	57.65 ± 3.48	52.5 ± 6.87		51.25 ± 4.85		39.43 ± 11.14	70.84 ± 10.7		67.33 ± 10.06