Acute Rheumatic Fever and Rheumatic Heart Disease – 18 Board-Style Cases with Answers

What this deck covers

Acute Rheumatic Fever and Rheumatic Heart Disease 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. One joint after another
2. Describe it precisely
3. The swab grew nothing
4. What a first attack sounds like
5. Two raised markers
6. Her handwriting fell apart
7. Lumps on the elbows
8. Two drugs, two jobs
9. How long it goes on
10. The dentist is asking
11. Two children, one difference
12. Eight years afterwards
13. Only eight days later
14. Nobody could hear anything
15. The visit that changed nothing
16. She cannot feed herself
17. Four of the last six
18. Worse than last time

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Acute rheumatic fever, Detection of the organism in the joint fluid, Minor criteria supporting the diagnosis, A tic disorder, in, Two uncommon but highly specific major criteria, Corticosteroids alone, Antibiotics only when he develops a sore throat, To suppress the ongoing inflammation in the valve, Leakage of the mitral valve, The classical illness with an atypical joint pattern, A tonsillectomy, An antibiotic course alone, Switching to daily oral penicillin.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Joints that hand over to the next joint. That pattern belongs to one illness.
• If the joints do not melt away on treatment, question the diagnosis.
• A negative swab is the expected finding, not the answer. Send the titres.
• First attack leaks. Years later it narrows. The murmur tells you which chapter you are in.
• They do not make the diagnosis. They tell you when to stop the treatment.
• Months late, nothing else to find, and it still buys ten years of penicillin.

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.