| Objective: Diabetic neuropathy is the general term for a variety of diseases of diabetes occurred in the nervous system, and could been clinically divided into peripheral neuropathy, cranial neuropathy, autonomic neuropathy, spinal cord lesions, brain lesions, muscle atrophy and the neuropathy in infants of diabetic pregnancy. Diabetic neuropathy is the most Common complication induced by chronic diabetic. It could affect any Position of the patients'nervous system. It is reported that more than 50% of diabetes patients have this complication, which affects the physical and mental healthiness of patients and the quality of their life. Severe cases may affect the lives of the patients. With the continuous development of clinical medicine and molecular biology techniques, the mortality and morbidity of various acute complications caused by diabetes were efficiently controlled. The problem of the damage caused by these chronic complications of neuropathy on the patients'safety and healthiness become increasingly conspicuous. To analyze the literatures of a disease in a certain period, you can find out the progress and the current status of the disease from one side. In this article, statistical analyzed the diabetic literatures from the bibliometrics, and to discuss the development and hotspots of this disease, providing some references for the related researchers.Methods: We selected(PubMed databases, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Pubmed) literatures that have used the words: "diabetic neuropathy" as key words and its hyponyms "diabetic neuropathy", such as peripheral neuropathy, cranial neuropathy, autonomic neuropathy, spinal cord lesions, brain lesions, muscular atrophy and the neuropathy in infants of diabetic pregnancy in PubMed database on each year from 1990 to 2009, and then make statistical analysis of these literatures on the following aspects, the age distribution and trends, journals, language, type, subheading, and study characteristics. By means of manual coding, documents were classified according to documents of study and to statistical analysis.Results: The statistical analysis results showed that the quantity of literatures about diabetic neuropathy in the database of PubMed from 2009 to 1990 were 10184 literatures, of which including peripheral neuropathy (n=6813), autonomic neuropathy (n=1339), cranial neuropathy (n=114), spinal cord lesions (n=10), brain lesions (n=11), muscle atrophy (n=44), and the neuropathy in infants of diabetic pregnancy. (n=6). The literature quantity was year by year slowly increases progressively, approximate straight line (y=22.923x+268.51) for literatures related to diabetic neuropathy (1990-2009). Most of the diabetic neuropathy literatures are English version (8408, 82.56%), followed by the German literatures (415, 4.08%), Japanese literatures (251, 2.46%), and Chinese literatures (92, 0.85%), ranked on the seventh.Conclusion: This study showed the steady increasing trends in the amount of DN literatures, indicating that the research about diabetic neuropathy is still a hotspot. Peripheral neuropathy is still the main focus; the hotspot and directions of the research are mainly on the treatment, pathophysiology, and etiology of diabetic neuropathy, and so on. |
