Febrile Seizures and the First Afebrile Seizure — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Febrile Seizures and the First Afebrile Seizure 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 paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Two minutes on the kitchen floor
2. What the registrar wanted to send
3. Irritable, and half treated
4. Left arm first, then everything
5. Her mother’s question
6. Will he get epilepsy
7. A long way from the hospital
8. An alarm set for three in the morning
9. The jab that is due next week
10. Shaking on the sofa
11. After a warm bath
12. Nothing to explain it
13. His right hand went first
14. Whether to start a drug
15. The pool, the bike and the bath
16. After he was told off
17. Home tonight, or a bed
18. Her arm an hour later

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: A simple febrile seizure, A complex febrile seizure, About one in ten, About a quarter of such children develop epilepsy, Rectal paracetamol at the first sign of fever, A focal seizure with retained awareness, Simple febrile seizures, Stop school sport and cycling but allow baths, Cyanotic breath-holding spells, An arterial stroke of the right hemisphere.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Brief, generalised, febrile, and back to normal afterwards. That sentence is the diagnosis.
• Work up the fever. The seizure has already told you everything it is going to.
• Under a year, on antibiotics, still drowsy: the textbook signs are not coming. Do the tap.
• Three questions: was it focal, was it long, did it happen again. One yes makes it complex.
• Tell them the real number. A family told ‘it won’t happen again’ comes back believing something is badly wrong.
• Simple seizure, normal child, no family history: one in a hundred. Say the number.

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 Neurology case decks · pediatric reference values.