YouTube as a source of information on pediatric scoliosis: a reliability and educational quality analysis

Purpose To assess the reliability and educational quality of YouTube videos related to pediatric scoliosis. Methods In December 2020, searches of “pediatric scoliosis”, “idiopathic scoliosis”, “scoliosis in children”, and “curved spine in children” were conducted using YouTube. The first 50 results of each search were analyzed according to upload source and content. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Benchmark Criteria were used to assess reliability (score 0–4), and educational quality was evaluated using the Global Quality Score (GQS; score 0–5) and Pediatric Scoliosis-Specific Score (PSS; score 0–15). Differences in scores based on upload source and content were determined by Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) or Kruskal–Wallis tests. Multivariate linear regressions identified any independent predictors of reliability and educational quality. Results After eliminating duplicates, 153 videos were analyzed. Videos were viewed 28.5 million times in total, averaging 186,160.3 ± 1,012,485.0 views per video. Physicians (54.2%) and medical sources (19.0%) were the most common upload sources, and content was primarily categorized as disease-specific (50.0%) and patient experience (25.5%). Videos uploaded by patients achieved significantly lower JAMA scores ( p = 0.004). Conversely, academic or physician-uploaded videos scored higher on PSS ( p = 0.003) and demonstrated a trend towards improved GQS ( p = 0.051). Multivariate analysis determined longer video duration predicted higher scores on all measures. However, there were no independent associations between upload source or content and assessment scores. Conclusion YouTube contains a large repository of videos concerning pediatric scoliosis; however, the reliability and educational quality of these videos were low. Level of evidence. V.