ORs were pooled using the method of DerSimonian and Laird(11), and 95% CIs were constructed using Woolf s method(12). The significance of the overall OR was determined using the Z-test. To measure sensitivity of our analysis results, each study was removed in turn from the total, and the remainder then reanalyzed. This procedure was used to ensure that no individual study was entirely responsible for the combined results. In addition, different combinations of the ethnic populations and different combinations of the alcohol-induced medical conditions (e.g., alcoholic liver disease, cirrhosis, and pancreatitis) were also analyzed. Genotypic analyses were carried out under both dominant and recessive models. Retrospective analysis was performed to better understand the potential effect of year of publication upon the results. The type I error rate was set at 0.05. The tests were two-tailed. The methods for literature search and those for linkage disequilibrium (LD) and haplotype structure analyses are shown in Supplement 1.
