Cellular senescence in kidney diseases: a bibliometric analysis of global trends, knowledge bases, and emerging therapeutic frontiers.

PURPOSE: Cellular senescence has emerged as an important mechanism linking renal ageing, acute kidney injury, diabetic kidney disease, chronic kidney disease, renal fibrosis, and kidney transplantation-related injury. This study aimed to map the global research landscape, knowledge bases, and emerging frontiers of cellular senescence-related kidney disease research.

METHODS

Publications were retrieved from the Science Citation Index Expanded of the Web of Science Core Collection. After screening by language and document type, 775 English-language articles and reviews were included. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to analyze publication trends, citation impact, collaboration networks, productive countries, institutions, authors, journals, highly cited documents, co-cited references, keyword co-occurrence, and citation bursts.

RESULTS

The field expanded rapidly after 2016 and reached its highest annual output in 2025. China and the United States were the leading contributors by publication volume. Co-cited reference clustering identified major knowledge bases related to renal ageing, chronic kidney disease-associated premature ageing, maladaptive repair, renal fibrosis, diabetic kidney disease, tubular epithelial injury, SASP, uremic toxicity, transplantation-related injury, and senescence-targeted interventions. Recent hotspots centered on diabetic kidney disease, acute kidney injury, kidney fibrosis, tubular epithelial cells, DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammaging, immunosenescence, extracellular vesicles, and senolytic therapy.

CONCLUSION

Research on cellular senescence-related kidney diseases has shifted from descriptive studies of renal ageing and chronic kidney disease complications toward disease-specific, cell-type-specific, and translational investigations. Future studies should integrate single-cell and spatial multi-omics, establish reliable renal senescence biomarkers, and develop safer kidney-targeted senotherapeutic strategies.