Quality of health information about epilepsy on the Internet: Evaluation of French websites

The Internet is now the single largest source of health information and is used by many patients who are affected by epilepsy and their families. Methods. - To assess the quality of information provided by French website on the different forms of epilepsy and their treatment, we used search engines (French pages from Bing,Google and Yahoo) to look for information using the French equivalent of three keywords epilepsy (Epilepsie); epilepsy treatment (Epilepsie traitement) and seizure (Convulsions). The websites were evaluated for content quality by using an adaptation of the validated DISCERN rating instrument. Each website was evaluated by three investigators (a naive observer, a pediatric neurologist and a neurologist). Results. - Most of the information on epilepsy and its treatment were from community websites. We found six French websites which were scored higher than half of the maximal value of our scoring system (>= 27.5/55): www.passeportsante.net; fr.wikipedia.org; www. fondation-epilepsie.fr; www.epilepsie-france.fr; www.doctissimo.fr; www.caducee.net. Conclusion. - This study provides a list of French websites that have been evaluated for the quality of their information. We did not observe any correlation between the quality of the information and priority on search engine listings. Websites sponsored by patients associations and by institutions should update their content more frequently or work on their search engine indexation to appear higher on search engine listings. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.