MedWire News: Most websites providing information on bipolar disorder offer good quality content, study findings suggest.

Dr Khazaal, from Geneva University in Switzerland, and team explain that undiagnosed and diagnosed people with bipolar disorder, as well as their relatives, may search for information about the mood disorder on the internet.

Therefore, it is important for websites to present high quality, evidence-based information, they say.

To investigate the quality of websites providing information on bipolar disorder, the researchers entered the keywords "bipolar disorder" and "manic depressive illness" into two of the most commonly used internet search engines.

The team examined the first 20 English language websites resulting from each keyword query, as research has shown that most people do not search beyond the first 20 retrieved links.

These websites were then divided into commercial, university, non-profit organisation, governmental, and 'other' sites, and assessed using a common method for rating accountability, presentation, interactivity, readability and content quality.

In total, 34 of the 80 retrieved websites were reviewed. One site was of governmental origin, four were owned by universities, 15 were commercial, 12 were owned by non-profit organisations and two were of other origin. Just less than half the sites displayed the Health on the Net Foundation logo, intended to indicate reliable, understandable, accessible and trustworthy health information.

The researchers found that the average quality of information provided by the sites was good, scoring an average 19 points out of a possible 28, with scores ranging from six to 27.

Interestingly, the quality of the content was significantly explained by readability, accountability and interactivity, but not by the site's origin or the presence of the Health on the Net Foundation logo.

The team also found that around 25% of sites provided information in more than one language, 18% had an intra-site search engine, 21% had a support group and queries could be submitted in 12%.

Dr Khazaal and team conclude: "This study brings to evidence the good content quality of bipolar disorder-related websites.

"A possible method to improve bipolar disorder websites would probably be to associate content quality with better readability, accountability and interactivity patterns or to promote two types of websites: 'Informative' versus 'Interactive'."