Mapping Nutrition and Tuberculosis Research: Insights From Bibliometric Perspective.

BACKGROUND: Malnutrition and tuberculosis form a mutually reinforcing vicious cycle. While nutritional interventions are crucial for TB management, the knowledge structure and research frontiers remain insufficiently characterised.

OBJECTIVE: To systematically analyse the structure, trajectory and frontiers of research in the nutrition-tuberculosis field using bibliometric methods.

METHODS: Relevant literature published since 2007 was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database. CiteSpace was employed to perform multidimensional analyses, including co-occurrence, cluster timeline visualisation and burst detection for keywords, citations and authors, thereby constructing knowledge maps and identifying key nodes through network centrality metrics.

RESULTS: A total of 4502 bibliographic records were analysed. Key findings include: (1) Vitamin D occupies a central position (frequency 326, centrality 70), bridging basic immune mechanisms and clinical applications; (2) research paradigms evolved from molecular mechanism exploration (2007-2012), through clinical translation validation (2011-2019), to systems biology integration (2019-2025); (3) gut microbiota (burst strength 11.73) and (fatty) acids emerged as frontiers; (4) diabetes-tuberculosis comorbidity revealed the complexity of metabolic-immune interaction networks and (5) high citation frequency of WHO reports indicates a pressing need for translating research into policy.

CONCLUSIONS: Nutrition-tuberculosis research is shifting from single-nutrient studies towards integrated 'nutrition-microbiome-metabolism-immunity' networks. Vitamin D remains central, but future priorities should focus on precision interventions, multi-omics integration and translation from mechanism to practice, especially for high-risk groups.