Head Injury, Concussion and Abusive Head Trauma — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Head Injury, Concussion and Abusive Head Trauma 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. Fine on the way to the car
2. Eight carpeted stairs
3. Out of the shopping trolley
4. Scoring a child with no words
5. Twenty minutes after the tackle
6. The cup match on Saturday
7. Back too soon after the first
8. Six weeks and still not right
9. A story that does not fit
10. Completing the assessment
11. What the eye doctor found
12. Noticed while seeing the rash
13. What the survey showed
14. A big head since birth
15. Eight months after the fall
16. Four hours after a ventouse
17. The first minutes in resus
18. Off the bicycle at speed

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Post-traumatic migraine with aura, Cranial ultrasound through the fontanelle, Use the paediatric verbal scale, in, Probable diffuse axonal injury, Accidental head injury from the fall described, Glutaric aciduria type 1, Cephalohaematoma of the right parietal bone, Preventing hypoxia and hypotension.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• The child who seems fine after the blow is the one to keep watching. Arterial bleeding takes an hour to declare.
• Four hours of watching costs nothing. A scan of a toddler’s brain is not nothing.
• Feel the scalp. A boggy swelling in a baby is a scan, whatever the story says.
• A crying baby is not a coma score of one. Use the paediatric column or you will over-treat him.
• No blackout does not mean no concussion. Ask what he remembers of the minute before.
• Back to the classroom before back to the pitch, and one step a day with no symptoms.

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.