An evaluation of the contents and quality of menopause information on the World Wide Web.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the content and quality of currently available World Wide Web based information about menopause.


METHODS
A sample of the 100 top sites obtained with the search engine Google for the key word "menopause" was evaluated according to predefined general and specific criteria, content type, language, and quality. The Internet popularity was established by the number of links to each website. Using a systematic scoring tool each site was assessed on factual information provided and quality of site.


RESULTS
The websites studied were heterogeneous in content and quality. The most frequent type of website has commercial content with low quality, biased or useless information. Few sites provided comprehensive medical information about menopause. The scientific societies not always provided complete information about the possible adverse events related with hormone replacement therapy. The results of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) and the Million Women (MW) studies are discussed by very few websites. Internet popularity did not correlate with measures of quality such as display of authorship, attribution or references, currency of information, and disclosure.


CONCLUSIONS
The content and quality of the websites concerning menopause are widely varied and sometimes biased to commercial goals. The dominant medical information is of low quality and do not comply with general quality scores although the most informative sites have comprehensive content about the menopause including the recent results of the WHI and MW studies.
Pérez-López
Faustino R
FR
Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zaragoza, Domingo Miral s/n, Zaragoza 50009, Spain. gine@unizar.es
D015914:Estrogen Replacement Therapy; D005260:Female; D014943:Global Health; D006266:Health Education / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards*; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000592:standards*; D008593:Menopause; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D016387:Women's Health