Hejia Wan,1,* Bingqi Wei,2,* Wenli Qian,3 Jing Zhang1 

1School of Nursing, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of China; 3School of Management, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Jing Zhang, Email 1839640376@qq.com

Objective: To explore the research trends and hotspots of health economics evaluations of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Methods: To explore the research trends and hotspots of health economics evaluations of chronic fatigue syndrome, 180 articles published between 1991 and 2024 were visualized and analyzed via CiteSpace 6.3 software. R3 and VOSviewer1.6.20 and R4.3.3. The content includes annual publication volume, journal distribution, author country, publishing organization, author collaboration, citation analysis, and keyword analysis in 7 aspects.
Results: Fewer studies have evaluated the health economics of individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome in China and abroad, Chinese studies are especially rare, and research results in the UK are mostly found in other countries. Moreover, cooperation and linkages between institutions, as well as between authors, are not yet strong.
Conclusion: The hotspot of health economics evaluation methods in this field is cost-effectiveness analysis, and the hotspot of diagnosis and treatment methods is cognitive‒behavioral therapy. We also found that chronic fatigue syndrome may also have a strong potential association with depression from the perspective of health economics. Health economic evaluations of multiple treatments should be conducted simultaneously to increase attention to this field and provide a reference basis for low-cost and high-quality diagnostic and treatment programs.

Keywords: chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis, health economics, CiteSpace, visual analysis, bibliometrics