Readability of online melanoma patient education materials

Melanoma is a serious, potentially life-threatening form of skin cancer. While early detection and timely intervention are critical to improving patient outcomes, understanding melanoma, including its risk factors, clinical presentation, and treatment options, can be challenging for patients due to complex medical terminology and detailed clinical information. Patient education materials (PEMs) play a key role in communicating health information to patients. Although national guidelines recommend that PEMs be written at or below a sixth-grade reading level, the average American reads at approximately an eighth-grade level. This study examined the overall readability of 36 online melanoma PEMs using multiple validated readability indices in a cross-sectional analysis. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to characterize the dominant readability dimension, and additional analyses examined textual characteristics associated with favorable and unfavorable readability performance. Overall, readability levels exceeded recommended standards, with most materials requiring at least a high school reading level. Greater textual difficulty was most strongly associated with longer words, a higher proportion of multisyllabic words, and longer sentence structure. These findings indicated that the sampled institutional melanoma patient education materials may present substantial textual barriers for the average patient. These findings support continued efforts to improve the readability of melanoma patient education materials so they more closely align with recommended health-literacy guidelines. Future research involving patient testing is needed to determine whether improved readability leads to better patient comprehension, decision-making, or clinical outcomes.