ORs were pooled using the method of DerSimonian and Laird(DerSimonian and Laird 1986), and 95% CIs were constructed using Woolf’s method(Woolf 1955). The significance of the overall OR was determined using the Z-test. For sensitivity analysis, 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, genotypic analyses were carried out under the dominant ((ValVal + ValIle) vs. IleIle) and recessive (ValVal vs. (ValIle + IleIle)) models. Different combinations of the ethnic populations and different combinations of the alcohol-related medical conditions (e.g., alcohol liver disease, cirrhosis, and pancreatitis) were also analyzed. Retrospective analysis was performed to understand better 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. In order to know whether there are other polymorphisms in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD) with this SNP in Asians and Europeans, haplotype construction, counting, and LD block defining over a broader genomic region of ADH1C were
