Fig. 1

The flow chart of collecting articles for analyzing the association. And a total of 355 articles were identified by the search strategy. Firstly, a total of 230 articles were removed according to the title and abstract, and 45 articles were removed as the studies did not use case-control method, and 26 articles were removed as the studies did not have sufficient data to calculate OR, and 10 articles were excluded as they did not evaluate the association between rs7903146 and T2DM. After that 44 articles remained. Then, 5 articles were excluded as the control groups didn’t meet the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE), 9 articles were excluded when we made subgroup analyses and reduced the heterogeneity, and 4 articles were excluded as some LADA or type 1 diabetes patients were included in the case groups. Finally 28 studies from 26 articles were left