In early 2020, an international expert group proposed changing the nomenclature of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) to metabolically associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) to better reflect the basic pathophysiology of NAFLD as a metabolic disease and to move toward «positive» diagnostic criteria rather than exclusion criteria. Two years later, the definition of MAFLD is increasingly being used in the medical literature, and recent studies have shown that the global prevalence of MAFLD is higher than NAFLD and that patients with MAFLD have more metabolic comorbidities compared with patients with NAFLD, and new evidence also suggests that all-cause and cardiovascular mortality may be higher in MAFLD compared with NAFLD. In this context, this review discusses the criteria for the diagnosis of MAFLD, the specific pathophysiology of the disease, and the prospects for therapeutic strategies, including the use of ademetionine.

Keywords: metabolically associated fatty liver disease, hepatoprotectors, ademetionine, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease