Women often feel embarrassed about urinary incontinence, hesitate to see a doctor and search the internet to gain information on the disease. The objective of this study was to evaluate the quality of the most viewed YouTube™ pertaining to female urinary incontinence.

Sixty videos that met the inclusion criteria were assessed by two urologists through Quality Criteria for Consumer Health Information (DISCERN), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and Video Power Index (VPI) scoring systems. Videos’ image type, video uploaders, general content, length, view counts, date of uploading, comment, like and dislike counts were also recorded and analyzed.

Forty videos included real and 20 animation images. Nine videos were uploaded directly by physicians, 32 videos by health channels, 14 videos by hospital channels, 2 videos by herbalists and 3 videos by other sources. The mean comment, like and dislike counts of the videos were found as 49.4 ± 172.9, 642.5 ± 2,112.9 and 66.7 ± 192.4. The mean DISCERN score was found as 38.2 ± 11.5, JAMA score as 1.4 ± 0.6 and VPI score as 85.1 ± 12.1. There was no significant difference between physicians and non-physicians and between real and animated videos in terms of DISCERN and JAMA scores (p>0.05).

The quality of the videos on YouTube™ pertaining to female urinary incontinence was at an average level. Healthcare professionals should be encouraged for uploading more accurate quality health related contents. Policy makers should develop policies for supervision of the videos uploaded on the internet.