Mesh complications on YouTube

Youtube videos as an information source about urinary incontinence

AIM

Youtube is one of the most popular video-sharing websites, and people use Youtube as a source of information. Patients with urinary incontinence may seek information about their condition on Youtube. This study aims to assess the videos on Youtube about urinary incontinence and evaluate the information regarding whether patients can understand and/or act accordingly.

METHODS

We performed a Youtube search with the keywords of "incontinence," "urinary incontinence," and "overactive bladder" in the English language with the incognito mode on the browser. All links were extracted and recorded in an excel file. Duplicated links were removed, and metadata of the videos were collected. A custom python language script was used to perform this operation. We selected the most viewed 150 videos for the assessment. After removing the non-related videos, 112 of them were included in the study. Two researchers separately evaluated all the videos with the Patients Education Material Assessment Tool (PEMAT, audiovisual version).

RESULTS

The total duration of all included (n:112) videos was 12.6 hours, and these videos had been watched 37,332,178 times until the query date. The vast majority of the videos were about information, management, and treatment options (Kegel exercises, surgery modalities) of incontinence, individual experiences of patients with incontinence, commercials about the diapers, and healthcare professionals who wanted to introduce themselves or their services. Mean understandability and actionability scores of the videos were 57.9% and, 44.7% respectively. Our analysis showed that only 12.5% of the videos on Youtube related to incontinence were understandable, as well as actionable, in terms of PEMAT scores.

CONCLUSION

According to our study, 87.5% of the videos about incontinence on Youtube.com in the English language were not understandable and actionable for users. Development of high-quality content about incontinence is needed.

YouTube as a source of information on gonadotropin self-injections

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the comprehensiveness, quality, and reliability of YouTube videos that target teaching patients gonadotropin self-injections.

STUDY DESIGN

Videos demonstrating gonadotropin self-injections were searched using the keywords "Gonal-f injection," "Puregon injection," "Menapur injection," "Merional injection," "Fostimon injection," and "Menagon injection," on December 20th, 2020. The videos were divided into two categories as including "useful information" and "misleading information" by two physicians. A 5-point global quality scale (GQS) and 5-point modified DISCERN scale were used for the assessments of quality and reliability, respectively.

RESULTS

Among 110 videos, 90 (81.8%) were found to include useful information and 20 (18.2%) were found to give misleading information. The kappa statistic for inter-observer agreement was 0.817 (p < 0.001). Useful videos were the most comprehensive and had the highest reliability and quality scores. We found that all videos uploaded by universities or professional organizations included useful information. However, there was no significant difference between useful and misleading videos regarding audience interaction analysis parameters (p > 0.05). On the other hand, mean reliability, GQS, and comprehensiveness scores were higher in the useful information group than in the other group. As the subgroup analysis was performed by source, patient opinion videos had lower reliability, comprehensiveness, and GQS scores than videos created by other sources (p < 0.001).

CONCLUSION

Our analysis revealed that there were a significant number of English-language YouTube videos, with high quality, rich content, and reliability that could be sources of information on the accurate technique of gonadotropin self-injections. However, some misleading information videos may lead to negative outcomes. Therefore, physicians should ensure that online sources are comprehensive and reliable for the use of their patients with infertility. Also, YouTube health videos should be checked for both reliability and ethical standards.