ESPE Abstracts

Background: Precocious puberty is one of the fastest-growing paediatric diseases in South Korea. As the UCC (User Created Contents) has provided lots of medical information, it becomes an easy and important source of medical information.

Objective and hypotheses: This study aimed to investigate and to evaluate the quality and scientific accuracy of precocious puberty-related UCC on Youtube.

Method: The key words ‘precocious puberty’, ‘pre-cocious puberty’, ‘precocious-puberty’, ‘pre-cocious-puberty’, ‘early puberty’, ‘early-puberty’, ‘sexual precocity’, ‘sexual-precocity’, or ‘precocity’ were searched into YouTube from June to July 2014. More than 1500 UCC matched the keyword. The 51 UCC were identified, excluding UCC that were duplicate, inaccessible, irrelevant, related to other disease, shorter than 1 min, and in foreign language other than Korean. According to information provider, it was classified as medical, oriental, commercial and others. We evaluated the quality with the DISCERN instrument ranging from 15 to 75, and giving a scientific accuracy with information score (IS) ranging from 0 to 60.

Results: The 51 UCC were analysed according to the information provider as medical (n=17), oriental (n=17), commercial and others (n=17). The overall quality score of medical UCC (score: 3.4) was significantly higher than that of oriental, commercial and others UCC (score: 2.8 and 2.3 respectively) (P<0.001). Assessing the scientific accuracy, the mean information score of medical (score: 30.7) was almost double the overall average (score: 17.2) and significantly higher than that of oriental, commercial and others UCC (score: 15.9, and 5.1 respectively) (P<0.001). Mean length of oriental UCC was the longest (P<0.001), however, hits was the lowest among them (P=0.088).

Conclusion: The quality and accuracy of precocious puberty-related health information on UCC were variable and not all of them were reliable. Overall quality of UCC regarding precocious puberty was moderate. Only medical UCC has provided scientifically accurate information compared to oriental, commercial and others UCC. As UCC becomes a popular source of health information, it is important to provide reliable information as well as scientifically accurate information.