Quality and Reliability Analysis of Essential Tremor Disease Information on Social Media: The Study of YouTube

BACKGROUND: YouTube has evolved into an important educational tool and information source for patients and their families. YouTube videos have the potential to influence the patients’ health-related diagnosis and treatment decision-making. We aimed to evaluate the quality and usefulness of videos on essential tremor available on YouTube using quantitative instruments. METHODS: Video searches were performed by typing the keywords ‘essential tremor’, ‘postural tremor’, ‘action tremor’, ‘essential tremor hand’, and ‘essential tremor head’ into the YouTube search bar. The top 30 videos were reviewed for each search term. The videos were analyzed by two independent raters using the DISCERN and Global Quality Scale (GQS) scoring systems. Qualitative and quantitative data were recorded for each video. RESULTS: A total of 83 videos were analyzed. The mean DISCERN score was 41.96 out of 75 possible points, and the mean GQS score was 2.97 out of 5 possible points. Twelve percent of the videos were categorized as very poor, 38.6% as poor, 20.5% as fair, 19.3% as good, and 9.6% as excellent. The videos containing qualitative content features, such as clear information, symptoms, etiology, diagnosis, treatment, treatment response, epidemiology, diagrams, and radiological images had significantly higher DISCERN and GQS scores. DISCUSSION: We consider that reliable and useful content is not provided on YouTube for individuals searching for information on essential tremor. We listed the best-quality videos on this topic as a reference for healthcare practitioners and patients. Patients should always verify information provided in such videos through more reliable sources.