PNPLA3 and alcoholic liver diseases: In contrast, the prevalence of patients carrying a PNPLA3 148M variant was significantly increased in the two groups with alcoholic liver disease and reached allele frequencies of 53.7% (p<0.001 versus healthy controls) and 36.2% (p = 0.033 versus healthy controls) in patients with and without hepatocellular carcinoma, respectively (figure 1).