Surfing for mouth guards: assessing quality of online information

Abstract

This study shows that there is a high amount of information about mouth guards on the Internet but that the quality of this information varies. It should be the responsibility of health care professionals to suggest and provide reliable Internet URL addresses to patients. In addition, an appropriate search terminology and search strategy should be made available to persons who want to search beyond the recommended sites.

Internet information on xerostomia: what should patients expect?

“…To the best of our knowledge, studies investigating Web‐based information on oral medicine and dentistry have been so far scarce and dealt with either head and neck cancer (López‐Jornet and Camacho‐Alonso, ; Ni Riordain and McCreary, ) leukoplakia (López‐Jornet and Camacho‐Alonso, ), orthodontic treatment (Jiang, ; Antonarakis and Kiliaridis, ; Patel and Cobourne, ; Aldairy et al , ; Livas et al , ) temporomandibular disorders (Türp et al , ; Park et al , ), mouth guards (Magunacelaya and Glendor, ), or periodontal diseases (Chestnutt, ). A wide variety of validation tools has been used in the aforementioned studies, for example JAMA benchmarks, DISCERN, HON seal, LIDA, FRES, Flesch‐Kinkaid Grade Level, Fog Scale Level, as well as personal scoring systems, making it difficult to compare the results and thus draw specific conclusions.…”

“…A wide variety of validation tools has been used in the aforementioned studies, for example JAMA benchmarks, DISCERN, HON seal, LIDA, FRES, Flesch‐Kinkaid Grade Level, Fog Scale Level, as well as personal scoring systems, making it difficult to compare the results and thus draw specific conclusions. As far as quality of the investigated sites is concerned, it can be generally argued that sites displayed either low (López‐Jornet and Camacho‐Alonso, , ), or low‐to‐moderate (Ni Riordain and McCreary, ; Park et al , ) or greatly variable quality (Jiang, ; Chestnutt, ; Antonarakis and Kiliaridis, ; Magunacelaya and Glendor, ; Patel and Cobourne, ; Livas et al , ), with the vast majority of studies underlining the lack of evidenced‐based high‐quality sites. The level of readability was overall judged fairly difficult and appropriate for 8th‐ to 9th‐grade‐level students (Antonarakis and Kiliaridis, ; Patel and Cobourne, ; Livas et al , ).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, studies investigating Web-based information on oral medicine and dentistry have been so far scarce and dealt with either head and neck cancer (L opez-Jornet and Camacho-Alonso, 2009;Ni Riordain and McCreary, 2009) leukoplakia (L opez-Jornet and Camacho-Alonso, 2010), orthodontic treatment (Jiang, 2000;Antonarakis and Kiliaridis, 2009;Patel and Cobourne, 2011;Aldairy et al, 2012;Livas et al, 2013) temporomandibular disorders (T€ urp et al, 2001;Park et al, 2012), mouth guards (Magunacelaya and Glendor, 2011), or periodontal diseases (Chestnutt, 2002). A wide variety of validation tools has been used in the aforementioned (Jiang, 2000;Chestnutt, 2002;Antonarakis and Kiliaridis, 2009;Magunacelaya and Glendor, 2011;Patel and Cobourne, 2011;Livas et al, 2013), with the vast majority of studies underlining the lack of evidenced-based highquality sites. The level of readability was overall judged fairly difficult and appropriate for 8th-to 9th-grade-level students (Antonarakis and Kiliaridis, 2009;Patel and Cobourne, 2011;Livas et al, 2013).…”

Knowledge of paediatric patients and their guardians about mouth guards

“…In this sense, the protector should be changed every year or reassessed if it is maladaptive. 10 Magunacelaya and Glendor's study 25 shows that there is a high amount of information about mouth guards on the internet but that the quality of this information varies.…”

Public (Skin) Health and the publishing source bias of Austrian information material

“…at). In agreement with scientific findings and with how consumers might perform an online search, only the first 50 click-able web links given by each query were considered for analysis [15,16]. Totally, 23 websites were retrieved.…”