Men are advised to look beyond YouTube and TikTok for information on prostate screening.
Devastating news if you get all your medical advice from TikTok and YouTube (although you’ll see the AMA are onto it if you’ve read today’s health lit story).
A team subjected themselves to watching the 50 most popular prostate screening-related videos in English on each of the two platforms, and analysed them for the presence of: recommendations for high-risk racial/ethnic cohorts, recommendations for family history of prostate cancer, prostate-specific antigen testing, blood tests other than PSA, genomic testing, digital rectal examination, age-specific screening recommendations, magnetic resonance imaging of the prostate for screening and targeted/fusion prostate biopsy.
The result was an emphatic thumbs down: “Overall, there were no videos that contained both high-quality and accurate information.”
YouTube fared slightly better than TikTok on some criteria, such as discussion of both the pros and cons of prostate cancer screening, and rated better on understandability and actionability. YouTube videos were “significantly more likely to contain accurate information relative to screening guidelines” – that is 12% compared with TikTok’s zero.
No TikTok videos cited a specific guideline, whereas one third of the YouTube videos cited at least one guideline.
Most of the YouTube and all of the TikTok videos had “moderate to significant levels of misinformation” when compared against the latest guidelines (the YouTube videos’ age could account for some of that, since half of them were five or more years old, but baby TikTok doesn’t have that excuse).
The authors cite evidence that eight in 10 American adults use the internet as a source of health information, so the implications are significant.
The team also analysed the videos for race/ethnicity representation. One way in which social media health content could be helpful, the authors say, is by alerting certain cohorts, such as Black and Hispanic men in the US, that they are at higher risk of prostate cancer mortality or serious disease.
Unfortunately, while Black and Hispanic men are bigger than average users of YouTube and TikTok, both those groups were significantly underrepresented in the videos the team studied. Given the quality of the information, the authors add, “increasing representation alone would be unlikely to result in high-quality consumer health information”.
The authors conclude by recommending “a collaborative effort from the medical community to create high-quality content regarding prostate cancer screening that also represents those patients who are most at risk”.
That’s a finger pointing at you, dear readers.
If you see something that warrants a poke around, send it to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
