two years were classified as alcoholic chronic pancreatitis (Shimosegawa et al. 2008)); two (Hendershot et al. 2009; Segado Soriano et al. 2005) because the patients were described nonspecifically as “drinkers”, rather than “dependent” or “abusers”; one (Nanakorn et al. 1999) because the patients had comorbid psychiatric disorders; one (Wei et al. 1999) because the cases and controls were related; one (Macgregor et al. 2009) because it was investigating twin pairs; four (Higuchi et al. 1996a; Kimura et al. 2009; Muramatsu et al. 1996; Vaswani et al. 2009) because no control subjects were recruited or control data were not available; one (Kuo et al. 2008) due to very low observed minor allele frequency (0.001) in their samples; and one (Shafe et al. 2009) because there was no genotype data available. In the end, 53 case-control studies met our criteria for inclusion. The studies included 52 studies (Chai et al. 2005; Chao et al. 1994; Chao et al. 2000; Chao et al. 2003; Chao et al. 1997; Chen et al. 1999; Chen et al. 1996; Chen et al. 1997; Fan et al. 1998; Guo et al. 2010; Hasegawa et al. 2002; Higuchi et al. 1996b; Huang et al. 2004; Iwahashi et al.
