Does TikTok Have Reliable Cholesterol Content?: Khush Kharidia, MD

At the ASPC 2025 Congress on CVD Prevention, Khush Kharidia, MD, a third-year internal medicine resident at UT Southwestern, discussed his team’s analysis of cholesterol-related content on TikTok. Their study examined the quality, accuracy, and potential health impact of videos across creator types, from physicians to influencers, and what this means for public understanding of heart health. In this interview, Kharidia reflects on the influence that creators on TikTok may have on health behaviors, the risks of misinformation, and the challenges of establishing credibility in a fast-moving digital landscape.

He presented the oral abstract, “Evaluating the Quality, Accuracy and Health Impact of Cholesterol-Related Content on TikTok: A Social Media Analysis,” at the meeting.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

How might the cholesterol-related content people see on TikTok influence their health decisions? Do you think it’s shaping real behavior or mostly reinforcing existing beliefs?

I'll preface this by saying that a lot of this is speculative; our study was mostly looking at what kind of information was out there, and we don't know exactly how it translates to real-world outcomes. But that being said, I think there have been past studies which show that online communities and discussions can promote healthy behaviors. And so we can speculate that people may be influenced by the type of content that they see online. Now, the TikTok algorithm, if you have a specific inkling, or if you engage in certain material more, they will give you more of that similar material—kind of creating a pseudo echo chamber. If people have a certain inclination one way or the other, and they start engaging in that kind of content repeatedly, then there's a possibility that they might see more and more of that information, whether it be misinformed or accurate information, and so I think that's really important.

The other thing that was kind of interesting—maybe not really directly related to your question, but we found that [the amount of post] shares was a negative predictor of accuracy. So the more something was shared online it was actually more likely to be inaccurate or harmful. I thought that was kind of interesting and related to the point that people do try to share content that might not be accurate or might not be what their doctor told them. And so I think it genuinely has potential to impact people's decisions.

I've seen it in my clinic, where people come in and ask me, "I saw this on TikTok, where taking your statin might cause Alzheimer's. Is that true, doctor?" I'm like, "Let's not look at that maybe in as much detail, and I'll give you some more information that I think is more valuable and helpful for you."

Did your analysis show a difference in content accuracy between licensed health professionals and nonexpert influencers—and if so, what does that say about trust and credibility on social media?

I think that's a very important question. Our analysis did look at the differences in the quality, accuracy, and health benefit between different creator types. So physicians and cardiologists—cardiologists and noncardiologist physicians—had greater accuracy scores, greater quality scores, and were more likely to be beneficial than other health care professionals and laypersons or lay influencers, and so that was a key finding of this study.

Now, a lot of nonphysician health care professionals would not always label themselves as so, they would say "Dr X" or "Dr ASPC," and then they would have a white coat and a stethoscope. Then, when you kind of dig into what their background was, they might be a doctor of naturopathic medicine or alternative medicine or chiropractors. So they had different backgrounds, and they were not all licensed MDs or physicians who might have allopathic training in medicine. We tried to kind of dig into their backgrounds and try to separate them in our Creator categories.