“…All of included 13 studies were published in English, the cases were histological, pathologically or cytological confirmed as CRC. Controls were mainly healthy populations, and matched with age and gender, 4 were hospital-based (HB) (Tavani et al, 1997;Inoue et al, 1998;Munoz et al, 1998;Zhang et al, 2002), 9 were population-based (PB) (Kato et al, 1990;Baron et al, 1994;Ji et al, 1997;Slattery et al, 1999;Woolcott et al, 2002;Il'yasova et al, 2003;Li et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2011;. There were 5 studies performed in China (Ji et al, 1997;Zhang et al, 2002;Li et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2011;, two in Japan (Kato et al, 1990;Inoue et al, 1998), two in the USA (Slattery et al, 1999;Il'yasova et al, 2003), one in Sweden (Baron et al, 1994), one in Italy (Tavani et al, 1997), one in Argentina (Munoz et al, 1998), and one in Canada (Woolcott et al, 2002).…”