How I Whiten My Teeth”: YouTube™ as a patient information resource for teeth whitening (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Internet offers an attractive and useful platform for patients seeking information about health. YouTubeTM is one of the most visited sites by patients who want to access medical information, and the YouTubeTM website is the world's second most popular site after Google in Internet. OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to assess the quality and content of information presented on YoutubeTM for patients seeking information on teeth whitening. METHODS YouTubeTM were searched for videos about teeth whitening using the term ‘‘teeth whitening’’. One hundred and ten results were assessed to obtain 100 acceptable videos. General video evaluation included views, duration, time since video upload, likes/ dislikes, number of comment, source, material types (dental, natural and other) and whilst video purpose was analyzed under nine categories (definition, material preparation, procedure of application, material comparison, after/before comparison, symptoms, post-op experience, commercial, educational). Each video was classified according to quality of information content as ‘good’, ‘moderate’ or ‘poor’. The Kruskal–Wallis, Pearson’s chi-squared test, and Spearman correlation coefficient were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS Most videos were uploaded by layperson (60%). Definition of teeth whitening was the most commonly covered topics (74.0%), followed by procedure of application (54.0%), post-op experience (36.0%). Only 12% of videos were classified as having good information quality content, 53% moderate and 35% were rated as poor. Poor content videos had significantly higher number of viewing rate than the other groups (p=0.016), while the duration was significantly higher in low content videos (p=0.003). There was a significant difference between the quality of video information and material types (p <0.001). CONCLUSIONS YouTubeTM should not be used as a fully reliable and accurate source for patient information. More studies are needed to investigate the quality of information about teeth whitening.