Relationship between health-seeking behavior and digital health literacy in epilepsy patients.
Emine Kaplan Serin, Derya Tülüce, Semra Usta
PMID 41082604WHAT IT FOUND
In adults with epilepsy, online health-information skills and online health-seeking were modestly linked.
Better education and more social media use were associated with higher skills, but this cannot show cause.
Key findings
01Digital health literacy was positively associated with online health-seeking, but the relationship was weak.
02Lower education and using social media for 1 hour or less daily were associated with lower digital health literacy.
03Digital health literacy was not significantly related to professional or traditional health-seeking.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study was done in one hospital outpatient clinic, so the participants may not represent epilepsy patients in other settings. It was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that digital health literacy causes health-seeking behavior or that improving literacy would change behavior. The sample was small (115) and based on self-reported questionnaire responses. It excluded people who could not read, had cognitive impairment, or had vision, hearing, or speech barriers, so it does not describe epilepsy patients with those barriers.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that improving digital health literacy will change health-seeking behavior. This cross-sectional survey only found weak associations at one time point in hospital attendees.