In addition, current reports on the treatment of thyroid nodules with TCM mainly focus on clinical efficacy observation of the drugs, with fewer studies exploring the action mechanism, and the signaling pathways are mainly centred around the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase and protein kinase B (PI3K-Akt) pathway and the apoptosis-related pathways, etc (Wang et al., 2023a; Yi, 2010; Li et al., 2017a). The gene discussed is AKT1; the disease is thyroid nodule.