AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: Table 1 shows the main information of the incoming articles, there are 1323 patients with HCC and the control group of 1896 patients with non-HCC, including liver cirrhosis, hepatitis, or normal healthy people in the meta-analysis.[19–34] The gold standard of 12 studies was identified by histopathology as HCC and the other 4 studies[21,26,31,33] were determined by clinical information, imaging, and AFP.