Table 1.

Characteristics of studies included in the meta-analysis

First author	Design	Yr	Country	Ethnicity	Case/control				Genotyping	HWE
					n	Arg/Arg	Arg/Pro	Pro/Pro
Yu et al[38]	HCC	1999	China	Asian	80/328	28/112	35/141	17/75	PCR-RFLP	0.02
Anzola et al[36]	HCC	2003	Spain	Caucasian	97/111	46/65	47/42	4/4	PCR-SSCP	0.38
Leveri et al[35]	PCC	2004	Italy	Caucasian	86/254	46/122	33/113	7/19	PCR-RFLP	0.30
Zhu et al[31]	HCC	2005	China	Asian	469/567	135/197	252/284	82/86	PCR-RFLP	0.32
Ezzikouri et al[30]	PCC	2007	Morocco	Caucasian	96/222	52/129	31/79	13/14	PCR-RFLP	0.69
Yoon et al[29]	HCC	2008	Korea	Asian	287/296	110/124	111/135	66/37	PCR-RFLP	0.98

HCC: Hospital-based case-control; PCC: Population-based case-control; PCR-RFLP: Polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism; PCR-SSCP: Single strand conformation polymorphism analysis of polymerase chain reaction products; HWE: Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium of genotypes in control group. χ²-test is used, if P > 0.05, frequencies of genotypes in control group was in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.