Abstract

APPLICATION OF HEALTH EDUCATION BASED MEDICAL SOCIAL MEDIA IN INITIAL THERAPY OF RADIOACTIVE IODINE FOR PATIENTS WITH GRAVES'S DISEASE, A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL

Xue Liu MD*, Tao Jiang MD, Huaiwei Xu MD, Zhen Shu MD, Qilian Ran, Jiang Wu MD, Youcheng Li MD and Shiliang Zhou MD

ABSTRACT

Background: Although radioactive iodine (RAI) has been used to treat Graves’ disease (GD) for more than 70 years, patients have little knowledge of thyroid diseases and are concerned about radiation, leading to poor clinical compliance and resistance to RAI therapy in most patients. Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the value of health education mode based medical social media in the first RAI treatment of GD, and to enhance patients' clinical compliance, improve patients' awareness of related thyroid disease knowledge. Patients: One hundred and twenty-six GD patients were treated with RAI for the first time. Methods: Patients were randomized into one of two groups: (1) experimental: medical social media was performed for health education, including We-chat, QQ and Weibo. Each GD patient is required to join the We-chat group established by our research institution; (2) comparison: Traditional health education was implemented, and patients did not join We-chat group. Our outcomes are clinical compliance score (CCS) and thyroid diseases awareness score(TDAS) in 6 months. Results: Of the 121 GD patients, 111 (91.7%) were effective with RAI, and 10 were ineffective or recurrent. The efficacy of RAI in GD was similar in the experimental group and the comparison group (91.7% vs 91.8%, P=0.978). The CCS and TDAS were higher than the baseline level in the two study groups (P <0.05). High school and higher (HSAH) patients in the experimental group had higher CCS than those in the comparison group (P=0.013).There was no significant difference in CCS between middle school and lower (MSAL) patients in the two study groups (P>0.05). The TDAS of both experimental group and comparison group were higher than the baseline level (P<0.05). After 6 months, the TDAS of experimental group was significantly improved by 92.9%, while the comparison group was slightly improved by 52.7% (P <0.05). The awareness of radiation safety was increased from 2 to 52 in the experimental group, but only 7 in comparison group. The TDAS of HSAH and MSAL patients in the experimental group were significantly higher than those in the comparison group after 6 months (P<0.01). Conclusions: The health education mode based medical social media can enhance the clinical compliance of GD and improve the patients' understanding of thyroid disease and radiation safety of RAI. This method of health education can be popularized and applied in clinics.

Keywords: Graves’ disease; radioactive iodine; health education, medical social media; patient compliance.