Quality assessment of videos on anterior cruciate ligament tear rehabilitation exercises: Is TikTok a good source of medical information for patients?

BACKGROUND

Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear is a common injury, and accurate and inaccurate medical information is readily accessible on social media platforms. We sought to assess the quality of rehabilitation exercise videos available on TikTok regarding ACL tears.

METHODS

We used the keywords "ACL rehab exercises" to search the TikTok database, and we reviewed the first 113 videos. We retrieved information such as the number of views and likes for statistical analysis. We considered 2 types of users: general users and health care professionals. We included videos with a subject about a rehabilitation exercise for ACL tears and in the English language. We excluded videos that were duplicates and that followed a TikTok trend. Two raters assessed the quality of videos with the Modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) instrument and the ACL Exercise Education Score (AEES). A third author resolved any disagreement. We calculated descriptive statistics and used the Mann-Whitney test for nonparametric samples to compare the quality of content between groups.

RESULTS

We included 106 TikTok videos in the analysis. Fifty-five videos were created by general users and 51 videos by health care professionals. Videos by general users had significantly more likes (57 700 v. 788, p = 0.02). The overall quality of videos was poor, according to the mDISCERN instrument (score 1.99 ± 1.18), although health care professionals had significantly better-quality videos (score 3.10 ± 0.04) than general users (score 0.96 ± 0.09) (p < 0.001). Significance was similar with the mean AEES (score 7.62 v. 4.85, p = 0.002).

CONCLUSION

Although health care professionals produced better-quality videos than general users, they were not the main producers of content in this study. Moreover, the overall quality and reliability of all the videos included in this study was poor. We encourage health care professionals to create a greater number of videos that contain quality information and that fit the TikTok format.