Previously submitted to: JMIR Dermatology (no longer under consideration since May 29, 2025)
Date Submitted: May 24, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Comprehensive Analysis of Online Patient Educational Materials for Lichen Sclerosus
ABSTRACT
Background:
Lichen sclerosus is a vulvar skin condition with sincere effects on patient quality of life. Due to the sensitive nature of the disease, patients are more likely to search their health information online. However, little is known about the quality of online patient educational materials for lichen sclerosus.
Objective:
To comprehensively assess online patient educational materials for lichen sclerosus
Methods:
Keyword searches for “lichen sclerosus” and “vulvar lichen sclerosus” were conducted using Google. Relevant results were assessed for readability, understandability, actionability, and overall quality.
Results:
Online patient educational materials were consistently written at a level higher than the recommended grade level and lacked understandability, actionability, and overall quality.
Conclusions:
As patients increasingly turn to online information for their health decisions, it is noteworthy that the majority of materials lacked acceptable readability, understandability, actionability, or overall quality. To bridge this gap, healthcare providers can play an important role by identifying or creating resources with accurate information to recommend to their patients. Future efforts in the development of patient education materials should prioritize improving readability, understandability, and actionability for vulvar lichen sclerosus.
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