Meningiomas are the most common type of primary brain tumor that arises from the brain or the spinal cord. Although the majority of meningiomas are benign, these tumors can cause problems as they grow and compress against vital parts of the brain or the spinal cord. The risk of meningioma increases with age. The most preferred treatment for meningioma is surgery.

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The complex nature of meningioma has led to a number of myths and misunderstandings about the disease. Patients generally want to learn about their illness and treatment choices, and a well-informed patient can play a more active role in decision-making and consequently experience less anxiety. However, healthcare specialists may provide insufficient information due to a lack of consulting time or by providing information in such a way that the patient cannot understand.

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Therefore, many patients now browse the internet for readily accessible and available medical information, with YouTube being one of the most popular sources of patient information on the internet.  Although patients can access medical information via YouTube, not everyone can assess the quality, reliability, and accuracy of this information. Biased or conflicting advice can not only lower the credibility of the clinicians but also harm the patients, especially when discussing different treatment choices. Hence, it is important to assess the accuracy of patient information on meningioma on YouTube.

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The foremost objective of the present study was to evaluate the quality of YouTube videos as a source of patient education. A secondary objective was to examine quantitative data including the video length, source of upload (physician, hospital, health information channel, and educational channel), popularity (number of views, views per day, number of likes, dislikes, and comments), and their associations with the video quality.

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A search was performed on YouTube on January 14, 2021, using the keywords “meningioma treatment,” “meningeal tumor treatment,” “meningioma brain tumor treatment,” “meningioma cures,” and “meningioma therapy.” “Relevance-Based Ranking” was used to sort the YouTube results, and the first 3 results pages of each search were assessed noting that 95% of users conducting a YouTube search watch no more than the first 60 videos retrieved in the search results. The review included videos reporting how the treatment works and the benefits, risk factors, and possible treatment choices for meningioma. All duplicate or irrelevant videos, where the latter were defined as videos not containing any information about meningioma treatment, were removed. Out of 150 records identified through YouTube searching, 83 duplicates were removed. Out of the remaining 67 videos, 6 of them were excluded because of irrelevance, and one video was for not being in the English language.

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Video contents were independently evaluated by 2 fifth-year medical students using the DISCERN scoring system for video quality analysis which is a tool to assess the quality of the videos on YouTube. The further set of statistics was evaluated using the like ratio and Video Power Index (VPI). It recorded whether videos included the following features: symptoms of meningioma; risk factors during treatment; results of treatment; steps on how to perform the procedure; discussion of the prognosis; an animation; a diagram; radiological findings; a brain anatomy explanation; a patient experience; and whether or not the speaker was a doctor.