The Completeness and Accuracy of Information about Coeliac Disease on the Romanian Websites

Keywords

coeliac disease, gluten intolerance, consumer health, information quality, Internet

Abstract

The internet has become an important source of health related information and a number of studies have shown that the quality thereof is, at best, problematic. Nevertheless, there are very few studies investigating the Romanian medical cyberspace. The goal of this study was to assess the completeness and accuracy of information about the coeliac disease on the Romanian websites directed to the general population. We evaluated a sample of 100 websites selected from the Google's first search results pages. The coverage of the topic was extremely deficient (the mean completeness score was 3.8 on a scale of 10), especially on sensitive issues such as the causes, treatment, and complications of the coeliac disease. On the other hand, the accuracy of the information was relatively good (mean accuracy score 7.2 on a scale of 10). With one exception, we found no statistically significant differences between the quality scores of the websites by their general characteristics.

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