What enlightenment has the development of lung cancer bone metastasis brought in the last 22 years

Abstract

Background: Lung cancer bone metastasis (LCBM) is a disease with a poor prognosis, high risk and large patient population. Although considerable scientific output has accumulated on LCBM, problems have emerged, such as confusing research structures.

Aim: To organize the research frontiers and body of knowledge of the studies on LCBM from the last 22 years according to their basic research and translation, clinical treatment, and clinical diagnosis to provide a reference for the development of new LCBM clinical and basic research.

Methods: We used tools, including R, VOSviewer and CiteSpace software, to measure and visualize the keywords and other metrics of 1903 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection. We also performed enrichment and protein-protein interaction analyses of gene expression datasets from LCBM cases worldwide.

Results: Research on LCBM has received extensive attention from scholars worldwide over the last 20 years. Targeted therapies and immunotherapies have evolved into the mainstream basic and clinical research directions. The basic aspects of drug resistance mechanisms and parathyroid hormone-related protein may provide new ideas for mechanistic study and improvements in LCBM prognosis. The produced molecular map showed that ribosomes and focal adhesion are possible pathways that promote LCBM occurrence.

Conclusion: Novel therapies for LCBM face animal testing and drug resistance issues. Future focus should centre on advancing clinical therapies and researching drug resistance mechanisms and ribosome-related pathways.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; Bone metastasis; Enrichment analysis; Immunotherapy; Lung cancer; Targeted therapy.

Figure 1

Flowchart of data collection from articles on lung cancer bone metastasis.

Figure 2

Annual change and distribution map of lung cancer bone metastasis knowledge volume. A: Annual publications and citations of articles on lung cancer bone metastasis (LCBM) from 2000 to 2022, the red line corresponds to “publications”; the green line corresponds to “citations”; B: Thermal diagram of the time distribution of national/regional articles, the values represent the ratio of the total number of papers published in a country from 2000 to a certain year to the total number of papers published in a country; C: Analysis chart of articles on LCBM at the country/region level.

Figure 3

Theme strategic coordinate map. A: Keywords plus; B: Authors’ keywords.

Figure 4

Time distribution chart of popular keywords. A: Burst detection graph of all keywords in articles on lung cancer bone metastasis (LCBM); B: Topic trend graph drawn based on keywords plus of the articles on LCBM; C: Topic trend graph drawn based on the authors’ keywords in the articles on LCBM.

Figure 5

Keyword time heat map. A and B: Keywords plus; C and D: Authors’ keywords. The A and C values represent the ratio of the frequency of a keyword in each year to its highest frequency in a year. The B and D values represent the ratio of the total frequency of the keyword from 2000 to a certain year to its total frequency.

Figure 6

Analysis of the co-occurrence of all keywords. A: Network visualization map; B: Overlay visualization map. The small circle represents the keyword. The area of the small circle represents the frequency of the keyword. The colors of the different areas represent their categories. The lines of the connecting circles represent keywords that appear in an article at the same time.

Figure 7

Molecular map of lung cancer bone metastasis. A: Bubble map of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) based on the Gene Ontology enrichment analysis; B: Bubble map of DEGs based on the Reactome enrichment analysis; C: Protein-protein interaction network diagram related to the ribosome pathway. GO: Gene Ontology.