Evaluation of the quality of information about pregnancy found in webpages according to the peruvian guidelines

Abstract

Objectives. The objective of this study is to evaluate the information quality about pregnancy symptoms in Spanish available in the internet. Materials and methods. This is an analytic, cross-sectional study. In order to evaluate the selected websites, we used a methodology previously validated by Curró et al. The websites were selected from Google, MSN.com and yahoo.com. The quality evaluation included three components: medical contents, accountability and usability of the website. The medical content was compared with the data available in the national guidelines for Comprehensive Sexual and Reproductive Health, from the Peruvian Ministry of Health. Results. Ninety nine websites in Spanish were evaluated. from them, 26.3% had medium adherence to the gold standard document. In 37.4% the websites were of low quality. A total of 24.2% were blogs, they were associated (as a protrective factor) to sites of poor quality (OR: 0.1, 95% CI: 0.02 to 0.5). Conclusions. The majority of websites in Spanish related to pregnancy symptoms have low quality. These findings indicate the need to properly educate patients and general public, and a critical evaluation of the information quality found at the Internet as well.