Chest Pain in Children – 18 Board-Style Cases with Answers

What this deck covers

Chest Pain in Children in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for board, MRCPCH and Prometric examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. The bag and the bedclothes
2. Half a minute, ten times a year
3. Which story stops the clinic
4. Three times on the pitch
5. Long fingers, tearing pain
6. Ten minutes into every session
7. Worse lying flat
8. The tablet at bedtime
9. Before school, never on court
10. Two days of pain and a cough
11. A click she can produce herself
12. An hour after the party
13. Struck by a cricket ball
14. Four children, one test
15. Pain first, blisters after
16. Still frightened after the test
17. The cough came first
18. Back a month later

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Costochondritis, Precordial catch syndrome, An anomalous origin of a coronary artery, Aortic dissection, Exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, Gastro-oesophageal reflux, Pill oesophagitis, Hyperventilation with anxiety, A simple painful crisis involving the ribs, Slipping rib syndrome, Cocaine-induced coronary vasospasm, Commotio cordis, Herpes zoster.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• If pressing on it reproduces it exactly, the chest wall is the answer.
• Thirty seconds of pain in a well child is a diagnosis, not a mystery.
• Exertional pain with faintness. Everything else can wait; that cannot.
• Exertional pain that has happened before, then a collapse. Image the coronary origins.
• Tall, tearing, through to the back. Image the aorta before anything else.
• Minutes in and minutes out is the airway. At peak effort with faintness is the heart.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Cardiology Board Questions case decks · pediatric reference values.