Treatment and Exploration of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Traditional Chinese Medicine

NAFLD is a long-term chronic disease that threatens human health and safety and will bring serious adverse consequences. Although the pathogenesis of NAFLD is still being carefully studied, there is no precise and effective western medicine for NAFLD. TCM has gained increasing attention in providing drug candidates for NAFLD treatment. Because of this, we review the progress of TCM research on NAFLD in terms of its etiology, pathogenesis, and clinical drug treatment with integrated Chinese and Western medicine. Although TCM physicians have different understandings of the etiology and pathogenesis of fatty liver in traditional Chinese medicine, it can be summarized as diet, fatigue, emotion, body deficiency, obesity and other causes of "liver Qi loss", "dysfunction of spleen in transportation", "phlegm endogenous", "blood stasis", "spleen and kidney deficiency". The location of the disease is the liver, spleen, and kidney. The nature of the illness is intermingled deficiency and excess. The excess is "Qi stagnation", "blood stasis", "phlegm", and the deficiency is the dysfunction of the viscera. At present, there is a lack of ideal therapeutic drugs for the prevention and treatment of NAFLD; Chinese medicine, as a common means of treatment in China, is more commonly used in the clinical application of NAFLD. The research and development of TCM, with its unique theoretical system and clinical efficacy advantages, combined with modern methods, is bound to play an increasingly important role in treating NAFLD, a complex metabolic disease.