98% of online lung cancer screening materials fall short of national literacy recommendations
Although findings from the 2011 National Lung Screening Trial prompted many U.S. health organizations to endorse the use of low-dose chest CT to screen for lung cancer, research published in the July issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology revealed almost 98 percent of online patient education materials outlining the benefits and risks of lung cancer screenings do not meet national literacy recommendations.
Researchers—led by David Richard Hansberry, MD, a radiologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia—found that only 2.5 percent of online lung cancer screening materials adhere to the recommendations of the National Institutes of Health and the American Medical Association — recommending that all patient education materials are written at a third-grade to seventh-grade level.
The average American reads at a seventh to eighth-grade level, according to a 2003 National Center for Education Statistics evaluation, and consequently, according to Hansberry and colleagues, patients with limited health literacy are more likely to overuse emergency care and have a higher rate of disease recurrence.
"Commonly visited online lung cancer screening–related patient education materials are written at a level beyond the general patient population’s ability to comprehend and may be contributing to a knowledge gap that is inhibiting patients from improving their health literacy," Hansberry et al. wrote.
For their study, researchers searched online the terms “pulmonary nodule,” “radiation,” “low-dose CT” and “lung cancer screening.” They then downloaded and analyzed the first 20 patient education materials found for each term. If the websites were not written specifically for patients, they were excluded from the study, Hansberry et al. wrote.
All 80 articles collected were written at an average 12th grade comprehension level, with comprehension levels across all articles found ranging from fourth to 19th grade, the researchers wrote.
In total, 62.5 percent of the of articles required a high school education to understand and 22.6 percent required a college degree or higher to understand. However, only 2.5 percent of the articles were written in adherence to NIH and AMA literacy recommendations of being written at a third- to seventh-grade reading level.
The researchers explained that creating patient education materials for lung cancer screening at an appropriate reading level and following National Institutes of Health and American Medical Association literacy recommendations has multiple benefits, including early detection and treatment, positively impacting the cost of U.S. health care, and, most importantly, would help close the communication gap between for patients who are at a significantly higher risk of lung cancer and have lower levels of education.
Doing so would not reduce the quality of information being relayed to the reader, the researchers affirmed, however using a simpler sentence structure and vocabulary would make the same information more easily understandable for the readers of all literacy levels.
A recent graduate from Dominican University (IL) with a bachelor’s in journalism, Melissa joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering all aspects of health imaging. She’s a fan of singing and playing guitar, elephants, a good cup of tea, and her golden retriever Cooper.