Assessment of the quality of information on treatment of keratoconus on YouTube.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the reliability, quality and effectiveness of YouTube videos addressing treatment of keratoconus.

METHODS

This is a retrospective, cross-sectional and register-based study. A YouTube search was performed using the keyword treatment of keratoconus, and the first 100 videos that came out were included in the study. The numbers of views, likes, dislikes, comments, daily viewing rate (number of views per day), uploaded source (physicians, public or private institution, health channel or patients), country of origin, video type (patient experience, scholarly information), and described treatment technique (contact lens, corneal cross-linking, intrastromal corneal ring, topography-guided photorefractive keratectomy, keratoplasty) were evaluated for all videos. They were also evaluated regarding their DISCERN, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), global quality score (GQS) and usefulness score by two independent ophthalmologists.

RESULTS

Of the top 100 videos, 83 videos met the criteria. The mean DISCERN, JAMA, GQS and usefulness score were 42.92 ± 18.14, 2.7 ± 0.73, 3.07 ± 1.25 and 2.99 ± 1.44, respectively. Of the 83 videos, 35(42.2%) had been uploaded by physicians, 19(22.9%) by patients, 15(18.1%) by health channel, and 14(16.9%) by institutions/private health institutions. In the correlation analysis, the four scoring systems showed a statistically significant and strong positive correlation with each other (p < 0.001). In addition, viewing rate DISCERN, GQS, usefulness scores, number of likes, dislikes and comments showed a statistically significant positive correlation.

CONCLUSION

The content of YouTube videos regarding treatment of keratoconus is of generally good quality and is educational for patients. Increasing the number of videos uploaded by healthcare professionals will increase the quality, reliability and informative features of the videos.