Epilepsy Syndromes of Childhood — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Epilepsy Syndromes of Childhood 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. Blank for a few seconds, many times a day
2. Which medicine to start
3. Settling it before any test
4. Gurgling at two in the morning
5. Whether he needs daily tablets
6. He has stopped smiling
7. The team meets to decide
8. Why today and not next week
9. Dropping the hairbrush
10. Which medicine, and for how long
11. Worse since the new tablets
12. Several kinds of seizure a day
13. Stitches to the chin, twice
14. Pale and vomiting in the night
15. They thought he had gone deaf
16. The girl they call a blinker
17. What the parents read about
18. Can she stop the tablets

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Childhood absence epilepsy, Levetiracetam, Night terrors, Start sodium valproate, Benign myoclonus of infancy, Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, Sodium valproate, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, A self-limited autonomic epilepsy of early childhood, An electroencephalogram recorded during sleep, The nocturnal timing alone.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Ask whether you can bring her out of it. If you cannot, it is not daydreaming.
• Absences only, and a girl: ethosuximide. Add a convulsion to the story and the answer changes.
• A pinwheel in the drawer is the cheapest diagnostic test in the clinic.
• Half a face, a lot of drool, no words, and wide awake through it. Nothing else looks like that.
• Not every epilepsy needs a drug. This one usually needs a calendar and reassurance.
• A baby who has stopped smiling is the finding. The spasms are how the family noticed.

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.