YouTube videos about prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment perhaps unsurprisingly are not reliable sources of information, according to a study published by a team of Dartmouth researchers on Oct. 8. The paper urges urologists to steer their patients toward more reliable online sources of information or to "produce information-rich and unbiased videos and upload them to YouTube."
"Given the surge in both online consumers of health care information and the massive amount of content available on YouTube, we analyzed the quality of information and potential sources of bias in YouTube videos pertaining to prostate cancer screening and treatment," the authors said in the paper.
The study, "YouTube as Source of Prostate Cancer Information" was published online in the journal Urology.
The researchers found 228 videos related to prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment posted on YouTube, and then analyzed the 51 that met their research criteria. These videos were divided into three categories: one category devoted to videos that discuss prostate screening tests, one on radiotherapy treatment videos and one on videos about surgery. The videos were ranked as excellent, fair or poor in terms of the quality of the information they presented. In addition, they were judged as biased for or against testing via prostate-specific antigen test and treatment via surgery and radiotherapy.
The study concluded that 73 percent of the videos had either fair or poor information, and that more than two-thirds of the videos were in favor of testing or treatment of prostate cancer. No video explicitly advocated against treatment.
"We thought what we would find were people who would post anti-prostate treatment videos," first author Peter Steinberg, a former urology resident at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said in interview with The Dartmouth. "We figured YouTube is an unedited media source and, for lack of a better word, wackos might post these kinds of videos."
The research team decided to conduct the study after spending an afternoon perusing medically related YouTube videos, Steinberg said. Steinberg noticed that several organizations had posted videos that argued against receiving vaccinations and decided to conduct further research into medical information posted online.
The group found a study published in December 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association that analyzed the videos. The study found that videos advocating against vaccination received more views than those advocating for vaccination, although the latter were more numerous. Much of the medical information in the negative videos was inaccurate and contradicted currently accepted medical practices.
The team decided to investigate whether this phenomenon existed among videos relating to other medical issues. They chose to examine videos related to prostate cancer because it has become an increasingly important medical issue, with 220,000 new cases reported in 2007.
