The Changing Landscape of Chronic Pancreatitis Research Trajectories Over Two Decades: A Global Meta-Analysis Using MeSH Terms.

OBJECTIVES

Significant progress has been made in research on chronic pancreatitis (CP). It is essential to analyze recent trends in this field to guide future clinical investigations.

METHODS

Publications related to CP research from 2000 to 2023 were retrieved from PubMed. An analysis was conducted on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, publication dates, and affiliations. For MeSH terms with a frequency greater than 30 times, co-occurrence analysis was performed to demonstrate the overall trend of CP research. For those that occurred more than 200 times, heat maps, 3D surface maps, and Ribbon Charts were created to illustrate the trend of changes every 2 years.

RESULTS

A total of 14,260 publications with 6775 MeSH terms from 2000 to 2023 were retrieved, and six clusters were obtained from the co-occurrence analysis. From 2000 to 2023, 35 MeSH terms with decreasing trends and 7 MeSH terms with increasing trends (MH-I) were selected to create a heat map. 7 MH-I were "signal transduction," "inflammation," "quality of life," "diabetes mellitus, type 2," "exocrine pancreatic insufficiency," "islets of Langerhans transplantation," and "transplantation, autologous."

CONCLUSION

The 21st century has witnessed CP research being propelled by both basic science and clinical research. Pathogenesis research focuses on signal transduction, while clinical research mainly focuses on the CP patients' quality of life, including pain, endocrine and exocrine function of the pancreas, among which pancreatic islet autograft transplantation is currently a hot topic. Emerging research topics such as stem cells and gut microbiota offer novel approaches for CP therapy.