Research trends and potential molecular intersections between diabetic kidney disease and sarcopenia: a 21-year bibliometric and bioinformatics analysis.

Abstract

Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) and sarcopenia are increasingly recognized as clinically relevant and potentially interrelated conditions in diabetes, aging, metabolic dysfunction, and functional decline. However, the global research landscape, evolving hotspots, and potential molecular overlap between DKD and sarcopenia remain insufficiently characterized. Publications on DKD and sarcopenia from 2005 to 2025 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and PubMed. After data cleaning, document-type screening, and deduplication, bibliometric analyses were performed using R, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace to assess publication trends, collaboration networks, keyword co-occurrence, thematic evolution, and burst keywords. For exploratory and hypothesis-generating bioinformatics analysis, DKD- and sarcopenia-associated genes were retrieved from GeneCards based on relevance score thresholds defined at the tenths place (DKD ≥ 39.4; sarcopenia ≥ 63.0). Shared genes were identified by Venn analysis and further examined using STRING-based protein-protein interaction analysis, Cytoscape/CytoHubba topological screening, and Gene Ontology and KEGG enrichment analyses with clusterProfiler. DKD-sarcopenia research showed an overall increasing publication trend over the past two decades. Japan, China, the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom were major contributors, and several Asian institutions showed prominent productivity. Keyword analyses indicated that hotspots mainly involved diabetes mellitus, sarcopenia, muscle strength, renal dysfunction, hemodialysis, inflammation, insulin resistance, physical performance, and aging-related metabolic disorders. Burst keyword and timeline analyses suggested a gradual shift from descriptive clinical and renal dysfunction-related topics toward functional assessment, comorbidity patterns, dialysis populations, and systemic metabolic complications. In the exploratory and hypothesis-generating gene overlap analysis, 761 overlapping candidate genes were identified between sarcopenia and DKD. These genes were mainly primarily found to be associated with oxygen and hypoxia response, energy metabolism, peptide hormone signaling, protein phosphorylation regulation, growth factor activity, insulin receptor binding, PI3K-Akt signaling, MAPK signaling, AGE-RAGE signaling in diabetic complications, FoxO signaling, HIF-1 signaling, diabetic cardiomyopathy, and cellular senescence. This study provides an updated bibliometric overview of DKD-sarcopenia research and identifies potential molecular intersections between the two conditions. The findings suggest that inflammation, metabolic dysregulation, hypoxia response, insulin/growth-factor signaling, and cellular stress may represent important directions for future investigation. However, the molecular findings are exploratory and hypothesis-generating rather than direct mechanistic evidence.