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The Internet is the largest source of health information and is widely used by inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients.
However, information is largely unregulated, Dr Sander van der Marel and colleagues from the Netherlands evaluated the quality, readability, accuracy, and accessibility of the information concerning inflammatory bowel disease available on the World Wide Web.
The phrases inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, and Ulcerative Colitis were entered separately as search terms into the 6 most commonly used search engines.
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| 43% of the sites were rated as excellent to good |
| Inflammatory Bowel Diseases |
Sites were categorized as institutional, pharmaceutical, nonpharmaceutical commercial sites, charitable, support, or alternative medicine.
The researchers evaluated websites for content quality using the validated DISCERN rating instrument.
Readability was graded by the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score.
Of the 76 websites evaluated by DISCERN, 43% of the sites were rated as excellent to good and 57% as fair to poor.
Alternative medicine sites scored significant lower than institutional, pharmaceutical, and nonpharmaceutical commercial sites.
The team observed no relation between a rating score and the position of a website on the search engine ranking.
The median Flesch Reading Ease Score was 42 and 12 for the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
Dr van der Marel's team concluded, "The quality of websites containing information on IBD varies widely."
"Most of the online material available is too difficult to comprehend for a substantial portion of the patient population, and good quality information may be beyond reach of the average information seeker."
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