The content and quality of patient-oriented information on the Internet about a modern radiation treatment strategy are generally poor, say researchers from the University of Chicago.

Many cancer patients want to know more about so-called intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), which, unlike conventional radiation therapy, tailors the dose of radiation to the three-dimensional shape of the tumor.

Many of the Internet sites that talk about the technique “treated IMRT as a ‘cure all,’ which, while a major breakthrough, isn’t the answer for everything,” Dr. Arno J. Mundt told Reuters Health. “I have the feeling that many of the sites were written by administrators more interested in attracting patients than outlining the pros and cons of this technology.”

Mundt and colleagues identified 77 Web sites dealing with IMRT using five popular search engines. They evaluated the sites for informational content, presentation, accuracy, and balance, awarding each site an overall score ranging from negative 35 points to 100 points.

The results are published in the medical journal Cancer.

Most sites (88 percent) provided a definition of IMRT, the authors report, but less than one third of the sites had information related to the IMRT process, and less than one half included information on fundamental aspects of IMRT planning and delivery such as target delineation.

More than one third of the sites (36 percent) contained a false statement, and 16 percent of sites contained multiple misleading statements. Only 60 percent of sites achieved high accuracy scores.

The average overall scores were 10 points for academic sites, 20 points for private sites, 25 points for commercial sites, and 20 points for other sites, the researchers note. All sites with scores of at least 70 out of a possible 100 points were commercial sites.

“We were originally planning to list the best sites,” Mundt said, “but unfortunately none of the sites did well across the board. We thus decided not to.”

He added that cancer specialists should be aware “that many of their patients are coming to the consultation with pre-conceived views on this technology and they should be ready to counter them, even if they are not brought up.”

SOURCE: Cancer, July 15, 2004.