Finally, one study was excluded because it lacked extractable data; and two studies were excluded because the data or sample sets overlapped with another one. Thus, a total of 10 studies were suitable for meta-analysis [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [20] [21] [22] [23] . Among them, seven studies were conducted with Asians [13, [16] [17] [18] 20, 21, 23] , two were conducted with European-Americans [14, 15] and one was conducted with Africans [22] . Two studies only included subjects of HIV-1 patients and HIV-1 exposed but seronegative (HESN) controls [21, 22] . Three studies included subjects of HIV-1 patients and healthy controls [15, 18, 20] , while the remaining five studies included subjects of HIV-1 patients, HIV-1 exposed but seronegative (HESN) controls, and healthy controls [13, 14, 16, 17, 23] . The total number of samples involved in the 10 eligible studies was 5946, which included 2683 HIV-1 patients and 3263 controls (2130 healthy controls and 1133 HIV-1 exposed but seronegative (HESN) controls). The characteristics of each study are listed in Table 1 .