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.