“…Of the remaining 25 full-text articles (Arbustini et al, 1996;Furuya et al, 1996;Császár et al, 1997;Sharma et al, 1997;Tomita et al, 1997;Xu et al, 1997;Garrib et al, 1998;Maliarik et al, 1998;Niimi et al, 1998;Takemoto et al, 1998;Pietinalho et al, 1999;Stokes et al, 1999;Papadopoulos et al, 2000;McGrath et al, 2001;Ruprecht et al, 2001;Schürmann et al, 2001;Planck et al, 2002;Alía et al, 2005;Biller et al, 2006;Kruit et al, 2007;Salobir et al, 2007;Tahir et al, 2007;Biller et al, 2009;Kruit et al, 2010;Yilmaz et al, 2012), 2 lacked controls (Stokes et al, 1999;Schürmann et al, 2001), and 2 did not examine patients with sarcoidosis (Ruprecht et al, 2001;Biller et al, 2006); these 4 articles were thus excluded. An additional 3 articles (Császár et al, 1997;Niimi et al, 1998;Kruit et al, 2007) were also excluded because of incomplete reporting of data. Therefore, a total of 18 articles (20 case-control studies, including 1882 cases and 3066 controls) were included in the current meta-analysis examining the association between the I/D polymorphism of the ACE gene and susceptibility to sarcoidosis (Arbustini et al, 1996;Furuya et al, 1996;Sharma et al, 1997;Tomita et al, 1997;…”