Among these, 36 proteins were found to promote the development of NAFLD (e.g., ANGPT1, ANXA3, CD40LG, CRKL, F2R, GOPC, ITGA5, PDGFA, PDGFB, SKAP2, SPARC, and TNFRSF9), while two proteins, RETN and EPHB6, exhibited protective effects by mitigating disease progression (Figure 4, Supplementary Table S9). Here, RETN is linked to metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease.