Global research landscape and trends of metabolomics in diabetic kidney disease: focus on immunometabolic interactions.

Introduction: Diabetic kidney disease (DKD), a devastating microvascular complication of diabetes mellitus, arises from intricate crosstalk between metabolic disorders and immune dysregulation. Metabolomics has emerged as a powerful tool to unravel the immunometabolic mechanisms underlying DKD, facilitating early disease diagnosis, mechanistic pathway interpretation, and therapeutic biomarker discovery. This study aimed to systematically delineate the global research landscape and evolutionary trends of DKD metabolomics, with a key emphasis on immunometabolic interactions. Methods: Relevant publications on DKD metabolomics published between 2015 and 2025 were comprehensively retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed databases. Multiple bibliometric and visualisation tools, including CiteSpace and the online bibliometric platform (https://bibliometric.com/), were utilised for data processing, visual mapping, and integrated quantitative and qualitative analysis. Results: A total of 1,410 eligible articles were included in the final analysis, among which 1,110 were sourced from the Web of Science and 299 from PubMed, demonstrating a sustained annual growth in publication volume. China contributed the largest number of publications (663 articles), followed by the United States (207 articles). The University of Michigan and Shandong University were the most productive research institutions. Li Ping and Sharma Kumar were identified as the leading productive and highly cited authors, respectively, with Kidney International recognised as the flagship journal in this research field. Keyword co-occurrence and co-citation analyses confirmed that DKD pathogenesis is predominantly governed by immunometabolic crosstalk. Specifically, renal lipotoxicity, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance trigger persistent renal inflammatory responses, while aberrant glucose metabolism, amino acid dysfunction, and gut microbiota disturbance disrupt renal immune homeostasis via the gut-kidney axis. Branched-chain amino acids and gut microbiota-derived metabolites serve as pivotal immunometabolic biomarkers. Clinical trial data from PubMed further validate the potential applications of these biomarkers, alongside the functional roles of immune regulatory molecules and their correlations with pathological alterations in DKD. Conclusions: This bibliometric study systematically profiles the global research panorama of DKD metabolomics with a focus on immunometabolic regulation. It consolidates well-established research domains covering lipid- and oxidative stress-induced immune disorders, and further identifies amino acid metabolism-related immunomodulation as a burgeoning research frontier. These findings establish a refined research roadmap for future mechanistic investigations and the development of targeted immunometabolic therapeutic strategies for DKD.