Spleen deficiency might also lead to metabolic disorders such as lipid metabolism, amino acid metabolism, and energy metabolism (Li et al., 2023; Sun et al., 2024; Zhan et al., 2024), as evidenced by our results showed that NAFLD patients with SDS exhibited abnormalities in TP, ALB, LDL, and total cholesterol (TG) levels. Here, ALB is linked to Other metabolic disease.