The following is a summary of “#IVF journey: content analysis of IVF videos on TikTok,” published in the December 2023 issue of Reproductive Bio Medicine Online by Peipert, et al.
What types of patients and results are shown in IVF movies on the app “TikTok” for sharing short videos?
For a cross-sectional study, researchers sought to look at the 100 most-watched TikTok videos with the #IVF title. The study only looked at movies that were in English or Spanish. Information from these movies was taken out by an automatic web-scraping tool. Standardized video code was used to examine the films and determine who was in them, what stage of care they were in, and how well the IVF worked. About 93 videos met the standards and got 731 million views, 91 million likes, and 893,000 shares.
Videos made by healthcare workers need to show more patients’ personal stories about IVF. When compared to real life, popular #IVF videos on TikTok showed a large number of same-sex couples (38.1%), gestational carriers (14.0%), multiple pregnancies (60.0%), and live babies (89.3%). The sixteen videos that made scientific claims were primarily accurate (93.8%). Most of the videos about IVF were either good (54.9%) or neutral (5.5%). TikTok’s popular #IVF videos added to the public conversation about infertility and brought attention to groups that needed to be better represented in health care in the past.
Videos could have taught more about health or made informative claims, and they got low marks for quality of knowledge and usefulness. This gap allows health professionals and teachers to reach out to patients thinking about IVF with more interesting and useful material.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1472648323004716
