The Quality of Information about Periodontal Disease in Turkish Internet Sites

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the quality of periodontal disease-related information provided on the Turkish webpages. Methods: An internet search was performed with the term ‘gum disease’ using the Google search engine. The first 100 websites were analyzed for content presentation and quality of information by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) criteria and DISCERN instrument. Results: Following the application of the exclusion criteria of this study, a total of 71 webpages were included for further analysis. According to the affiliation, 69% of the webpages belonged to a dental health center, 12% private hospital, 7% newspaper, 6% university, 3% professional organization, and 3% commercial. All websites assessed by the DISCERN instrument resulted in an average score of 2.21 (±1.01), indicating low to moderate quality. Of the 71 websites evaluated, only 38% fulfilled the authorship, 6% the attribution, and 18% the currency benchmarks of JAMA. According to the content presentation, 75% of the sites did not have proper information about oral hygiene instructions. Conclusion: The present findings suggested that the quality of periodontal disease-related information provided on the Turkish webpages have important shortcomings. Key Words: Gingival disease, Internet, Public health informatics, Periodontal disease