A knowledge structure of unmet medical needs of people with disabilities

Objectives: With the increasing number of people with disabilities, the importance of their health condition has increased since they have a higher risk of noncommunicable diseases and less access to healthcare services. Many studies on the them have focused on factors influencing their unmet medical needs. However, the no study has reviewed the research trend of the unmet medical needs experience of the people with disabilities. Thus, we identified the knowledge structure of this research topic and determined its research trend. Methods: We conducted a text network analysis of the abstracts of 4723 papers published before November 2020. A total of 17,295 words remained after preprocessing. We used these words to identify the knowledge structure of the research topic, its core keywords, and change of research topic by time. Results: “Care,” “illness,” “service,” and “health” appeared as the main keywords that formed four topics. The proportion of each topic changed by time. We investigated the research field from a macroscopic point of view by looking at the overall network structure and understanding the research trends. Conclusion: We expect that this study will contribute to the establishment of a knowledge structure related to the unmet medical needs of the people with disabilities.