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Abstract
Purpose
We assessed the quality of information available to patients on benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and prostate cancer on the Korean internet web sites.
Materials and Methods
This research was undertaken by surfing the internet on the world wide web sites, including naver, nate, daum, yahoo and empas. The key words for the search were ‘BPH’ and ‘prostate cancer’. We evaluated two main themes, and these were aspect of the contents and the technical contents. The aspects of the contents were the content and authorship, and the technical aspects were related to design and efficiency.
Results
We evaluated 45 web sites that focused on BPH and 24 web sites that focused on prostate cancer. From among the web sites, 27 (60%) of the 45 BPH sites and 16 (67%) of the 24 sites gave medical information. Only 14 (31%) of the 27 BPH sites and 12 (50%) of the 24 prostate cancer sites dealt with full information. The average score of these 43 web sites was only 34.5±13.6 of a perfect score of 100. The mean score of the content was 10±5.1 of 40 points, authorship was 4.3±3.3 of 20 points, design was 10.4±3.3 of 20 points and efficiency was 9.8±4.6 of 20 points. A total of 28 (65%) out of the 43 providers of information were urologists and 23 (82%) out of the 28 were general practitioners. The rate of research on prostatic disease was lower than that for ‘hypertension’, ‘diabetes’, ‘stroke’ and ‘hepatitis’.
REFERENCES
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Fig. 1.
(A) Classification of the 43 web sites' information sources. (B) Among the urologists, classification of the authors.
Fig. 2.
Comparison of the web sites' mean scores for the urologists and non-urologists. The scores of the urologists' web sites' scores are higher than that of the non-urologists web sites (p＜0.01).
Fig. 3.
The number of web sites that are concerned with each disease and that appeared in the search engines. The number of web sites that are concerned with prostatic diseases are lower than that for other diseases (p＜0.01).
Table 1.
Rating criteria
Table 2.
Mean score of the web sites based on the criteria listed in methods
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