BACKGROUND
Testicular torsion is an acute scrotal disease requiring urgent management, and the Covid-19 pandemic has been demonstrated to lead to poor outcomes of the disease. Nowadays, an increasing number of people tend to seek health information on YouTube.
OBJECTIVE
This study aims to quantitatively assess the quality of English YouTube video content as an information source of testicular torsion.
METHODS
In this cross-sectional study, a search was performed with the search term “testicular torsion” on YouTube, and the first 100 videos listed by relevance were selected for our analysis. Duplicate videos, non-English videos, videos without audio and surgical videos were excluded. Video features (duration, number of days online, views, likes, comments), source of the video, and author’s country were collected. We assessed the quality of each included video using DISCERN and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Benchmark Criteria. The correlation analysis was performed between video features, source of the video, DISCERN scores and JAMA scores.
RESULTS
A total of 66 videos were included and analyzed in the study. The most common video content was general information including etiology, symptoms, and treatment. The majority of videos were from education and training websites (30%), physicians (23%), and independent users (21%). The mean DISCERN and JAMA scores were 36.56 and 2.68, respectively. According to DISCERN, the quality of video uploaded by physicians was relatively high (P< .001), and the quality of video uploaded by independent users was relatively low (P< .001). The JAMA score had no relevance to the source of the video (P= .81). The correlation between the video features, DISCERN and JAMA scores was controversial by different assessment methods.
CONCLUSIONS
Despite most of the videos on YouTube being uploaded by medical or education-related authors, the overall quality was poor. The misleading, inaccurate and incomplete information may pose a health risk to the views, especially in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much effort needs to be taken to improve the quality of health-related videos regarding testicular torsion.