In this meta-analysis, most of the included studies did not report whether the SLE patients received corticosteroid therapy or therapy with other immune-suppressors before the sampling of blood to detect IL-6; hence, we could not obtain sufficient data to conduct the subgroup analysis to determine the reliability of the pooled analyses on the correlation between IL-6 and SLE. The gene discussed is IL6; the disease is systemic lupus erythematosus.