Reliability of Online Information on Self-Examination and Oral Cancer

Author Info

Ana Katarine Almeida Rios Cristina Cangussu Jakeline Martins Novaes Pedreira Mércia Sacramento dos Santos Thais Feitosa Leitão Oliveira

Corresponding Author

Cristina Cangussu
Titular Professor, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

A B S T R A C T

Introduction: Periodic dental consultations and oral self-examination can increase the chances of an early diagnosis of oral cancer. However, the restricted population access to health services in Brazil added to the greater scope of the internet has increased the use of this resource as a source of information on signs, symptoms and treatments of several diseases, including oral cancer. Objective: To assess the reliability of the information on self-examination and oral cancer available on the web in Portuguese for Brazilian population. Methodology: In December 2018, independent searches were performed for the terms "mouth cancer", "oral cancer", "oral self- examination/ self-examination" and "buccal self- examination / self-examination", on Google Search (Portuguese terms). The first fifty pages were selected for each term, and those that included prevention, diagnosis of oral cancer or described verbally and visually the oral self-examination were included in the study. The quality of the information was assessed according to the criteria of the American Medical Association and Health on the Net. Of the 108 sites evaluated, 87% did not inform the author's training, 24.1% did not inform the complementary nature of the information and 64.8% provided guidance consult a doctor or dentist. Scientific references were not present in 39.8% of the sites and the “accurate and complete” content was observed in only 35.2% of the evaluated pages. Conclusion: The low quality of the information available on the evaluated pages, suggests low reliability of the content about oral cancer and oral self-examination available on the web, indicating that access to this content may bring risk to the health of the Brazilian population.

Article Info

Article Type

Research Article

Publication history

Received: Fri 17, Apr 2020
Accepted: Mon 04, May 2020
Published: Tue 30, Jun 2020

Copyright

© 2023 Cristina Cangussu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.DOBCR.2020.02.07