Background: In 2019 approximately 7000 live donor nephrectomies and living donor kidney transplants were performed in the United States, accounting for 29.3% of all kidney transplants nationally. There remains an urgent need to increase living kidney donation to help mitigate the high demand for waitlisted kidney failure patients. Potential kidney donors can readily access social media, particularly YouTube, to gain basic knowledge about live donor nephrectomy surgical procedures. YouTube is an open source platform where anyone can upload videos about any topic without peer review or quality control, and is frequently used for the dissemination of health education1. This calls into question the credibility of YouTube videos as a source of patient education for potential live kidney donors. This study aims to assess the quality and accuracy of information regarding live donor nephrectomy on YouTube.

Methods: A YouTube search was performed using the keywords “donor nephrectomy” and “kidney transplant”.  The top 20 videos of the “Donor Nephrectomy” search result, and all videos with over 10,000 views from the search result “Kidney Transplant” were assessed for eligibility criteria. Two validated tools for evaluating health information, the DISCERN2 and PEMAT-A/V3 tools, were utilized by two reviewers to assess YouTube video information quality, understandability, and actionability. The scores from the two reviewers were compared using interrater reliability to verify consistency of scoring. Data on source and video characteristics, presence of physician in video, and clinical mention of information related to donor nephrectomy were collected.

Results: A total of 53 of 57 screened videos were included in this study with 4 videos being excluded for not being primarily in English language. The number of views ranged from 9.46 million to 590, with a mean of 719,414. 33 (62.3%) of the videos were identified as promotional and included information on a specific practice, company, or health corporation. A medical doctor was present in 28 (52.8%) videos, 15 (28.3%) videos mentioned a surgical approach of any kind (open, vs laparoscopic vs robot assisted), and 8 (15.1%) videos mentioned potential acute or chronic complications/risks associated with live donor nephrectomy or living kidney donation. The mean (SD) DISCERN score was 23.3 (± 8.3), and the mean (SD) PEMAT-AV Understandability and Actionability scores of 41.7% (±17.5) and 8.2% (±22.9%), respectively.

Conclusions: Information on living donor nephrectomies is prevalent on YouTube. Our assessment using quality measures of selected videos illustrates substantial misinformation on living donor nephrectomies. YouTube has the potential to be a source of reliable and accurate information on living donor nephrectomies and donation.