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To the Editor: The Health Literacy Report of the Council on Scientific Affairs¹ makes the important point that communication with patients is facilitated when clinicians tailor health information to patients' literacy and comprehension levels. The report also notes that the National Adult Literacy Survey from the US Department of Education found that nearly half of American adults have low-level reading skills.² In fact, the mean reading level of US adults is at grade 8, and the mean reading level of Medicaid enrollees is at grade 5.³

Given these statistics, it is surprising to see the high reading difficulty level of patient education material presented in JAMA. In April of 1998, JAMA began publishing the JAMA Patient Page.⁴ The JAMA Patient Page provides educational handouts, specifically targeted at patients, based on important articles published in each issue of THE JOURNAL.

We subjected these handouts to a formal analysis of reading . . . [Full Text of this Article]