Acupuncture for fatty liver (NAFLD)

Fatty liver disease is unfortunately becoming a widespread problem. It may be ‘silent’, with no obvious signs, or common symptoms can range from fatigue and malaise (feeling ill) to itching to feelings of pressure or discomfort in your liver area (under your right ribcage).

In some cases nonalcoholic liver disease can progress to other forms of liver disease, but the implications are not limited to your liver health. Fatty liver disease also indicates a metabolic imbalance, which unfortunately can promote cardiovascular problems including hardening of your arteries, fatty deposits in your blood vessels, and heart disease.

Conventional medical recommendations include weight loss, cutting out sugar and exercise, to improve insulin resistance, which can be a driver of fatty liver disease. With the right lifestyle changes, your nonalcoholic fatty liver disease may be reversible.

Can acupuncture help?

Scientific research into the benefits of acupuncture for fatty liver disease is one of the areas that has advanced far enough that a systematic review and meta analysis study has been completed. This is a study of the available individual studies, which pools and re-analyses the data from those studies.

A team did this in 2021, and these were their findings:

“8 RCTs with 939 patients were included. This meta-analysis showed that AT [acupuncture treatment] was superior to CM [conventional medicine] in improving overall clinical efficacy … In addition, AT plus CM could significantly improve overall clinical efficacy compared to treatment with CM alone … Moreover, the benefits were also demonstrated in other outcomes, including alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase, total cholesterol, triglyceride, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol indexes. However, AT plus CM could not decrease body mass index levels in comparison with CM. The safety profile of Acupuncture therapy was satisfactory.

And their conclusion:

“Acupuncture may be [an] effective and safe for treatment of NAFLD [non-alcoholic fatty liver disease]. However, due to insufficient methodological quality and sample size, further high-quality studies are needed.”

So we will have to wait and see what further studies will tell us, but the research so far is looking promising for the benefits of acupuncture for fatty liver disease.