Hunter P V, Delbaere M, O'Connell M E, Cammer A, Seaton J X, Friedrich T, Fick F
St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, 1437 College Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7M 0W6, Canada.
Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan, 25 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A7, Canada.
BMC Geriatr. 2017 Jun 15;17(1):125. doi: 10.1186/s12877-017-0515-3.
One of the most common uses of the Internet is to search for health-related information. Although scientific evidence pertaining to cognitive health promotion has expanded rapidly in recent years, it is unclear how much of this information has been made available to Internet users. Thus, the purpose of our study was to assess the reliability and quality of information about cognitive health promotion encountered by typical Internet users.
To generate a list of relevant search terms employed by Internet users, we entered seed search terms in Google Trends and recorded any terms consistently used in the prior 2 years. To further approximate the behaviour of typical Internet users, we entered each term in Google and sampled the first two relevant results. This search, completed in October 2014, resulted in a sample of 86 webpages, 48 of which had content related to cognitive health promotion. An interdisciplinary team rated the information reliability and quality of these webpages using a standardized measure.
We found that information reliability and quality were moderate, on average. Just one retrieved page mentioned best practice, national recommendations, or consensus guidelines by name. Commercial content (i.e., product promotion, advertising content, or non-commercial) was associated with differences in reliability and quality, with product promoter webpages having the lowest mean reliability and quality ratings.
As efforts to communicate the association between lifestyle and cognitive health continue to expand, we offer these results as a baseline assessment of the reliability and quality of cognitive health promotion on the Internet.
互联网最常见的用途之一是搜索与健康相关的信息。尽管近年来有关促进认知健康的科学证据迅速增加，但尚不清楚有多少此类信息已提供给互联网用户。因此，我们研究的目的是评估普通互联网用户获取的有关促进认知健康的信息的可靠性和质量。
为了生成互联网用户使用的相关搜索词列表，我们在谷歌趋势中输入了种子搜索词，并记录了过去两年中一直使用的任何搜索词。为了更接近普通互联网用户的行为，我们在谷歌中输入每个搜索词，并对前两个相关结果进行抽样。2014年10月完成的这项搜索产生了86个网页的样本，其中48个网页的内容与促进认知健康有关。一个跨学科团队使用标准化方法对这些网页的信息可靠性和质量进行了评级。
我们发现，信息的可靠性和质量平均处于中等水平。检索到的页面中只有一个提到了最佳实践、国家建议或共识指南的名称。商业内容（即产品推广、广告内容或非商业内容）与可靠性和质量的差异有关，产品推广者网页的平均可靠性和质量评级最低。
随着关于生活方式与认知健康之间关联的宣传工作不断扩大，我们提供这些结果作为对互联网上促进认知健康信息的可靠性和质量的基线评估。
