TLR7 and autoimmune disease: A potential role for TLR7 activation in promoting MetS is of particular interest due to evidence that increased TLR7 activation may contribute to the development of the autoimmune disease lupus (Satterthwaite, 2021; Wang et al., 2022; Wolf et al., 2018), and that lupus is also associated with a high prevalence of MetS (Mok, 2019).