Commentary
Some studies showed that the effect of SGLT2 inhibitors on weight loss was useful for the alleviation of NAFLD and SGLT2 inhibitors can significantly reduce bodyweight in NAFLD patients. In addition, a recent cohort study suggested that the administration of SGLT2 inhibitors to patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus could improve serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels in clinical practice. However, there are no specific statistics on the degree of reduction of ALT by SGLT2 inhibitors.
Therefore, B. Xing et al. (Department of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, Hospital of Qingdao, China) carried out a meta‐analysis on the effects of several common SGLT2 inhibitors on ALT, liver fat and bodyweight. Six studies including 309 participants were eligible for the meta‐analysis. The authors found that compared with other oral antidiabetic drugs, SGLT2 inhibitors can significantly decrease ALT (−11.05 IU/L). Bodyweight and visceral fat area were also reduced. As pointed out by B. Xing et al., the limitation of this meta-analysis is that the sample size of the included studies was small. Therefore, more large randomized controlled trials specified on NAFLD are required to evaluate these results.
