Lost in print: difficulty in reading online information pertaining to phenylketonuria

Abstract

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is the most prevalent inborn error of amino acid metabolism, necessitating patients to strictly restrict dietary phenylalanine. As this can be a confusing and concerning diagnosis, patients and loved ones will likely be drawn to learn more. A critical factor for citizens to harness the health-related digital information is to ensure that it is easy to read. This study assessed the readability of 100 digital articles related to PKU and explored the effect of the source of online information on the readability of these articles. For each article, 5 readability tests were conducted using on-line readability software. From the 100 assessed websites, 34% were commercially sourced. Of the remaining 66 sites, 40% had.org and 17% had.gov extensions. All 5 tests confirm that a large majority of the sample was written at an unacceptable reading level. In fact, over two-thirds of the sample received a readability score within the difficult range for three of the tests, while the remaining two deemed 49% and 45% of the sample as difficult to read, respectively. Commercially sourced websites were deemed to be more difficult to read than the other sites with respect to the two of the five measures. Despite the large amount of PKU information online, most of it may be incomprehensible to the average person and thus miss the mark in helping patients and caregivers manage their condition. Opportunities exist for authors of digital health promotional information to effectively achieve their goal by using comprehensible, easy-to-read language.