Elsevier

World Neurosurgery

Volume 153, September 2021, Pages e179-e186
World Neurosurgery

Original Article
Quality of YouTube Videos on Meningioma Treatment Using the DISCERN Instrument

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2021.06.072Get rights and content

Objective

To assess the quality of YouTube videos on meningioma treatment.

Methods

A search was performed on YouTube using the keywords “meningioma treatment,” “meningeal tumor treatment,” “meningioma brain tumor treatment,” “meningioma cure,” and “meningioma therapy.” Sixty-one videos were independently evaluated by 2 fifth-year medical students using the DISCERN scoring system for quality analysis. Quantitative data such as video length, source of upload, and popularity and their associations with DISCERN scores were also evaluated.

Results

The mean total DISCERN score was 36.4. Approximately a third of YouTube videos were classified as very poor, 32.8% as poor, 11.5% as fair, 16.4% as good, and 4.9% as excellent. The question “Does the video refer to areas of uncertainty?” obtained the lowest score (2.0), and the question “Does the video describe how each treatment works?” obtained the highest score (3.0). Videos authored by a health information channel had the highest mean total DISCERN score (46.7, standard deviation = 14.6). Videos had significantly higher DISCERN scores if they included information about the symptoms of meningioma, risk factors during treatment, prognosis, or included animations and diagrams. DISCERN scores were moderately positively correlated with duration of videos and referrers and moderately negatively correlated with number of channel subscribers, video power index, and average daily views.

Conclusion

The information content on meningioma treatment in YouTube videos was generally poor. The impact of inaccurate YouTube videos on patients' understanding of meningioma treatment must be recognized by health care professionals.

Introduction

Meningiomas are the most common primary central nervous system neoplasm (incidence 7.61/100,000), and they account for approximately a third of all central nervous system neoplasms. The risk of meningioma increases with age (average age at diagnosis: 66 years), and benign and malignant meningiomas are more common in women.1 Meningiomas arise from the meningothelial cells covering the brain and spinal cord. Current guidelines (World Health Organization [WHO] 2016) classify meningiomas into 15 subtypes across 3 grades based on histological criteria, with grade corresponding to the risk of recurrence and survival and thus fundamentally impacting clinical management.2 Most meningiomas are benign WHO grade I lesions, but patients with certain WHO grade II and III meningiomas have a higher risk of recurrence and shorter survival times.3 Symptoms are generally associated with gradually increasing intracranial pressure and include headache (33.3%–36.7%), focal cranial nerve deficits (28.8%–31.3%), seizures (16.9%–24.6%), cognitive changes (14.4%), and weakness (11.1%).4 Meningiomas are managed through a combination of observation, surgical resection, radiotherapy, and, in rare cases, chemotherapy.5

The complex nature of meningioma has led to a number of myths and misunderstandings about the disease. Patients generally want to learn about their illness and treatment choices,6 and a well-informed patient can play a more active role in decision making and consequently experience less anxiety. However, health care specialists may provide insufficient information due to a lack of consulting time or by providing information in such a way that the patient cannot understand. Therefore, many patients now browse the internet for readily accessible and available medical information,7 with YouTube being one of the most popular sources of patient information on the internet.

YouTube is the world's largest media-sharing platform and is second only to Google in terms of website popularity.8 Anyone can upload videos, including medical content that has not undergone peer review.9 Although patients can access medical information via YouTube, not everyone can assess the quality, reliability, and accuracy of this information. Biased or conflicting advice can not only lower the credibility of physicians but also harm patients, especially when discussing different treatment choices.10 Therefore, it is important to assess the accuracy of patient information on meningioma on YouTube.

To our knowledge, there has been no previous study of YouTube videos on meningioma treatment. We therefore evaluated the quality of YouTube videos as a source of patient education. A secondary aim was to examine quantitative data including video length, source of upload (physician, hospital, health information channel, and educational channel), and popularity (number of views, views per day, number of likes, dislikes, and comments), and their associations with video quality.

Section snippets

Study Design

This was a cross-sectional study of publicly available videos and did not include any human participants or animals, so ethics committee approval was not necessary.

YouTube Search

A search was performed on YouTube on January 14, 2021, using the keywords “meningioma treatment,” “meningeal tumor treatment,” “meningioma brain tumor treatment,” “meningioma cure,” and “meningioma therapy.” The video searches were conducted after clearing the search history and without providing a user id and a password.

Results

Thirty videos were analyzed for each of the 5 keywords (meningioma treatment, meningeal tumor treatment, meningioma brain tumor treatment, meningioma cure, and meningioma therapy), and 83 duplicates were removed. After screening, using our inclusion and exclusion criteria, 61 videos underwent further analysis (see Figure 1).

The mean total DISCERN score was 36.4 (standard deviation [SD]: 14.0). According to DISCERN groupings, 34.4% of the YouTube videos were classified as very poor, 32.8% as

Discussion

To our knowledge, this is the first study to use a validated instrument to assess the quality of YouTube videos on meningioma treatment. The information content on meningioma treatment in most of the examined YouTube videos was poor. Approximately 34% of videos were classified as very poor, 32.8% as poor, 11.5% as fair, 16.4% as good, and 4.9% as excellent. The low total DISCERN scores indicated that the quality of information on meningioma treatment on YouTube is poor, and the video content

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Paulina Śledzińska: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Marek G. Bebyn: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Jacek Furtak: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge editorial assistance from Nextgenediting (www.nextgenediting.com).

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    Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that the article content was composed in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

    Paulina Śledzińska and Marek G. Bebyn contributed equally to this work.

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