Role of Regulatory B Cells in the Pathogenesis of Metabolic Associated Fatty Liver Disease

The prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) increases rapidly in recent decades. NAFLD has become a major public health problem in the whole world, and it is considered as the main cause for the chronic liver diseases (Feng, 2020).

Eslam et al. (2020) recently published an international expert consensus statement about a new definition of metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) to replace non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

The new nomenclature of MAFLD is based on the presence of steatosis in >5% of hepatocytes and the absence of excessive alcohol consumption or other causes of chronic liver disease, diagnosis of MAFLD could be established on the presence of hepatic steatosis in combination with one of the following three criteria: overweight/obesity; presence of type 2 diabetes mellitus; or evidence of metabolic dysregulation (Eslam et al. (2020).

Metabolic dysregulation is defined as having at least 2 of the following metabolic risk abnormalities: high waist circumference, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-diabetes, insulin resistance, and high plasma C-reactive protein levels (Eslam et al. (2020).

New diagnostic criteria for MAFLD were proposed, in which hepatic steatosis (HS) detected either by imaging techniques, blood biomarkers/scores or by liver histology (Bedogni et al., 2006; Wong et al., 2019).