Background: Stroke is a major contributor to disability and death worldwide. Studies have demonstrated that inflammasome/pyroptosis and its mediated inflammatory response are important factors aggravating brain injury after stroke. We aimed to investigate and map the knowledge structure and global trends on inflam- masome/pyroptosis in stroke.
Methods: All relevant documents were obtained from the Web of Science on 5 June 2023. Bibliometric visualization diagrams were created using VOSviewer and CiteSpace. Excel was used for statistical analysis and drawing graphs.
Results: A total of 1106 publications were included, with more articles published each year, especially since 2014. China (740 papers), Zhejiang University (57 papers), Wang J (25 papers), and the Journal of Neuroinflammation (45 papers) were the most productive countries, institutions, authors, and journals, respectively. The United States was the country with highest centrality (0.56) and total link strength (171), and all of the top 10 institutions were in China. China and the U.S. cooperated closely. The centralities of the top 10 authors were all lower than 0.01; no leader has yet emerged in this field. "NLRP3 inflammasome" ranked first with 447 occurrences among 2136 keywords, of which 56 terms appeared more than 10 times when categorized into four clusters: cluster 1 (inflammation), cluster 2 (pyroptosis), cluster 3 (NLRP3 inflammasome), and cluster 4 (neuroinflammation). The studies focused on the mechanisms of inflammasome/pyroptosis in stroke were mainly limited to cell and animal experiments.
Conclusion: Interest in inflammasome/pyroptosis in stroke is progressively increasing. The NLRP3 inflammasome is the most extensively studied and has been a research hotspot. The mechanisms of cell death in stroke are complex and future studies are needed to strengthen the clinical research on the relationship between pyroptosis-related processes and stroke, determine at which stage NLRP3 inflammasome activation, and clarify the detailed mechanism of NLRP3 in stroke.
Keywords: pyroptosis; inflammasome; stroke; inflammation; neuronal death.