gms | German Medical Science

Background: Patients with prostate cancer who are often of older age are more Internet-active than other elderly individuals (32), with a mean rate of Internet use of 32% (24). Prostate cancer is an example of a disease where there is an increasing patient migration phenomenon. In different countries and cultures, there are different and competing health beliefs regarding disease.

Methods: WE searched the English-, German-, Arabic- and Hebrew-Language Internet for prostate cancer web sites using 14 popular search engines. Evaluation was done with a 36-item questionnaire. Formal and content-related information quality was measured. To minimze inter-rater variability kappa statistics were used.

Results: Of 7,043 unique hits returned by search engines, 6,361 non-relevant hits were excluded from the study. Twelve websites showed a kappa of less than 0.7 and were excluded to minimize possibly poor inter-rater variability. In total, 670 websites were included in the study; 483 (72.1%) in English, 135 (20.2%) in German, 35 (5.2%) in Arabic, and 17 (2.5%) in Hebrew. Only about half of the websites offered comprehensive information about surgery, radiotherapy, or hormone therapy. Information on advanced, metastatic disease (e.g. palliative radiotherapy or supportive therapy) as well as important clinical symptoms (e.g. dysuria or hematospermia) were given by only 2.9%, 0.2%, 28.4%, and 25.7% of the English websites, respectively. However, information quality on Arabic web sites were even poorer.

Conclusions: The Internet emerges as valuable instrument for evaluating intercultural differences, e.g. by by analyzing different deficits in information quality between different cultures.