5. Limitation
NAFLD
Although our research is a randomized, double-blinded, double-simulated multicenter study, but our research still has some limitations. First of all, our study did not incorporate the gold standard of liver biopsy into our main results because of the expected early stages of NAFLD in these patients and the short duration of intervention, which weakened the reliability of our results to a certain extent. Moreover, this study did not use multiple imputation to account for missing values but performed maximum likelihood methods for the primary end point. In addition, 24 patients were lost during follow-up (20%) in our study. This could be a huge missing and may represent a bias to the study. Finally, due to our inclusion of patients and the limited duration of intervention, long-term, large-scale placebo-controlled, rigorous randomized controlled studies are still required to confirm our results.