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YouTube™ as a source of information on prostatitis: a quality and reliability analysis

International Journal of Impotence Research volume 36, pages 242–247 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

It was aimed to analyze the YouTube™ videos on prostatitis regarding their source, content, and information included. The term “prostatitis” was searched by relevance and the first 200 video links and features were recorded. Using the 5-point modified DISCERN tool, Global Quality Score (GQS), and Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) score, the quality and reliability of the information were assessed by two urologists. Inter-rater agreement for DISCERN, JAMA, and GQS had Cohen’s kappa coefficients of 0.883, 0.887, and 0.885, respectively. The most common source of upload was doctors/medical institutions (33.0%), and the majority of the content was about general information (27.0%). The mean modified DISCERN, GQS and JAMA scores were 3.24 ± 1.23 (1.00–5.00), 3.25 ± 1.26 (1.00–5.00) and 2.17 ± 1.36 (0.00–4.00), respectively. These scores were correlated with each other (r = 0.914, p < 0.001 between JAMA and GQS; r = 0.954, p < 0.001 between JAMA and modified DISCERN; and r = 0.885, p < 0.001 between GQS and modified DISCERN, Spearman test) and were the highest in the videos uploaded by doctors/medical institutions (p < 0.001, Kruskal-Wallis test). Of the videos, 25.5% were poor, 30.5% were moderate and 44.0% were high quality. The high quality videos were significantly shorter than those with poor quality (p = 0.039, Kruskal-Wallis test). The poor quality videos had the highest view ratio (50.49 ± 127.74 (0.03–618.91), p = 0.036, Kruskal-Wallis test). Most YouTube™ videos on prostatitis are short and high quality videos uploaded by doctors/medical institutions. However, these videos have less view ratios than those with poor quality.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the figshare repository at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20763790.v1.

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Acknowledgements

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urology, Ankara City Hospital, Ankara, Turkey

    Binhan Kagan Aktas, Doruk Demirel, Ferhat Celikkaleli, Suleyman Bulut, Yalcin Kizilkan & Cuneyt Ozden

  2. Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics, Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Emrah Gokay Ozgur

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Contributions

BKA: the conception and design of the study, acquisition of data, writing-original draft. DD: acquisition of data, writing-original draft. FC: literature search, drafting the article, review and editing. EGO: statistical analysis and interpretation of data. SB: drafting the article, review and editing. YK: the conception and design of the study, review and editing. CO: critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content, supervision. All authors agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. All authors read and approved the version submitted.

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Correspondence to Binhan Kagan Aktas.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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The study was approved by local ethics committee (Number: E1-21-2182).

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Aktas, B.K., Demirel, D., Celikkaleli, F. et al. YouTube™ as a source of information on prostatitis: a quality and reliability analysis. Int J Impot Res 36, 242–247 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41443-023-00666-9

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